In that essay, I quoted Frank Zimring’s position on the impact of the war on drugs on violent crime as so: He also argues (pp.90–99), correlating hospitalizations and deaths from overdose with changes in the known street price, that overall use of cocaine appears to have remained relatively constant across the period of time in which New York City’s crime drop took place. Yet, he notes (pp.91–92) that “The peak rates of drug–involved homicide occurred in 1987 and 1988”—the same year that 70% of arrestees were found to test positive for cocaine—“and the drop in the volume of such killings is steady and steep from 1993 to 2005. … The volume of drug–involved homicides in 2005 is only 5% of the number in 1990.” Meanwhile, whereas 70% of arrestees in the late 1980s tested positive for cocaine, by 1991 (see table 2 on page 14) this number hit a low of 62%—and in 1998 it had fallen all the way to 47.1%. By 2012 (see figure 3.7 on page 45) this number fell even further to 25%.

What happened here? Why would drug use amongst arrestees fall if drug use as a whole remained constant? Zimring has an important answer: “If I’m a drug seller in a public drug market and you’re a drug seller in a public market, we’re both going to want to go to the corner where most of the customers are. But that means that we are going to have conflict about who gets the corner. And when you have conflict and you’re in the drug business, you’re generally armed and violence happens. … Policing … [helped drive] drug trade from public to private space. … [this] reduced the risk of conflict and violence associated with contests over drug turf. The preventive impact [of these policies] on lethal violence seems substantially greater than its impact on drug use. … [And] once the police had eliminated public drug markets in the late 1990s, the manpower devoted to a special narcotics unit [whose funding had increased by 137% between 1990 and 1999] dropped quite substantially [and yet the policies’ impacts on homicide rates remained].”

However, Zimring is clearly incorrect that the drug war reduced drug–involved homicides without reducing drug use as a whole—the drug war reduced drug use, too.

Quoting James Q. Wilson in the Wall Street Journal in 2011: “Another shift that has probably helped to bring down crime is the decrease in heavy cocaine use in many states. … Between 1992 and 2009, the number of admissions for cocaine or crack use fell by nearly two-thirds. In 1999, 9.8% of 12th-grade students said that they had tried cocaine; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 5.5%.

What we really need to know, though, is not how many people tried coke but how many are heavy users. Casual users who regard coke as a party drug are probably less likely to commit serious crimes than heavy users who may resort to theft and violence to feed their craving. But a study by Jonathan Caulkins at Carnegie Mellon University found that the total demand for cocaine dropped between 1988 and 2010, with a sharp decline among both light and heavy users. … Drug use among blacks has changed even more dramatically than it has among the population as a whole. As Mr. Latzer points out—and his argument is confirmed by a study by Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub and Eloise Dunlap—among 13,000 people arrested in Manhattan between 1987 and 1997, a disproportionate number of whom were black, those born between 1948 and 1969 were heavily involved with crack cocaine, but those born after 1969 used very little crack and instead smoked marijuana.

The reason was simple: The younger African-Americans had known many people who used crack and other hard drugs and wound up in prisons, hospitals and morgues. The risks of using marijuana were far less serious. This shift in drug use, if the New York City experience is borne out in other locations, can help to explain the fall in black inner-city crime rates after the early 1990s.”

Thus, because “drug use among blacks has changed even more dramatically than it has among the population as a whole”, if the black:white ratio of those in prison for drug use is larger than the black:white ratio of drug users in the general population, this may be because much of the disproportionately black number of users of cocaine have already been arrested—to the benefit of the black population as a whole.

Similarly, “In a recent article in the American Sociological Review, my colleagues and I [Gary LaFree] found that a proxy measure of crack cocaine had a greater impact on big city crime than more common measures like unemployment.”

A 1994 study by Eric Baumer found that “… arrestee cocaine use has a positive and significant effect on city robbery rates, net of other predictors. The effect of arrestee cocaine use on homicide is more modest … [but] cocaine use elevates city violent crime rates beyond levels expected on the basis of known sociodemographic determinants.” And a 1997 Justice Department study found that “there was a very strong statistical correlation between changes in crack use in the criminal population and homicide rates … In five of the six study communities, … homicide rates track quite closely with cocaine use levels among the adult male arrestee population.”

Throughout this series, I’ve shown interest in taking popular claims of “institutional” racism against blacks, and exploring evidence which reveals that contrary to common impressions, little to no racism is involved in the institution in question at all. In Are African–Americans Disproportionately Victimized By Police?, I provided an original analysis by asking exactly how many violent crimes white and black suspects have to commit before one white or black suspect interacting with police is shot—and there I found that, per crime and therefore per encounter with police, whites are in fact almost two times morelikely to be shot by police than blacks. It turns out that black suspects only appear to be more likely to be shot by police because they are more likely to interact with police to begin with because they commit more violent crimes. Control for that, and the policing bias against blacks not only disappears; it actually does in fact reverse and count against whites. (And I’d like to note that even if you already knew that blacks commit more crimes than whites, it wasn’t a pre–given that these numbers would be sufficient to produce such a reversal—it could have been the case that part of the gap in police shootings was explained by interaction rates, and part by racist bias. But in fact, there is absolutely nothing left over for racist bias to account for once those numbers are ran; and both the raw numbers corrected for violent crime rates and the best experimental study data in fact reveal a bias against whites–or, in other words, in favor of blacks.)

Similarly, in Violence Against Women and Violence Against Truth, I exposed the absurdity of a mainstream feminist publication which claimed that the fact that rates of assault and murder have fallen relatively more for men than they have for women over the past few decades is evidence that “deep structural gender inequities … marginalize women” without making any acknowledgment of the fact that across recent history 3 out of 4 victims of violent crime have been men to begin with. If anyone is being “marginalized” here, it is men: even after these disproportionate reductions in victimization by violent crime of men and women which Ms. Magazine bemoans as women failing to have “anywhere near parity rights to physical freedom and security”, in 2013, for every 2198 men victimized by violent crime, there were only 2097 women. The fact that even mainstream feminist publications can get away with a claim like this shows just how dangerously distorted so–called “feminist” reasoning can be—and how little other self–proclaimed feminists are doing to correct this kind of reasoning when it appears within their midst.

So, I might have created the impression that my aim throughout these posts is simply to debunk all claims of racism or sexism whatsoever. In this post, I’d like to address an issue that gives me the opportunity to demonstrate that this is not the case—but continue demonstrating the solidity of my actual thesis: prison sentencing length.

The worldview of the left–wing social justice warrior could well be summarized by a speech given by the novelist John Scalzi in which he claimed that if life were a role–playing game, “white male” would quite simply be the easiest difficulty setting, whereas “minority female” would be equivalent to setting the difficulty to “hardcore.” According to this scheme, one person can still have more success on the higher difficulties than another person has on a lower one, but there is a linear and one–dimensional increase in penalty regardless of one’s individual skills and talents as one moves away from “white” and “male.”

The model I’d like to propose, in contrast to this, is that setting one’s race and gender in life is less like choosing a difficulty setting in a video game than it is like choosing a class: Mage, Archer, or Warrior?

Each character type will have different advantages and disadvantages against other character types in different contexts—and especially because each class is born in a different kind of environment in the first place, these differences can’t really be measured in a way that allows them to be ranked against each other on any single–dimensional scale. In one environment with high elevation weakening the strength of the mage’s connection to the earth and thus his power but with steep mountains making travel more difficult yet allowing the archer to perch himself atop a steep hill, the warrior may win against the mage and lose to the archer. But in another environment with level plains and a low elevation, the warrior may win against the archer who can’t find high ground on the plains, but lose to the mage whose connection to the earth is at its peak.

Which class is “better”? There really is no objective way to say.

Looking at things this way need not require us to dismiss all claims of discrimination against women and minorities—but it also allows us to reject the ridiculous view that white males are simply sitting snidely together atop a superficially measured social pyramid of unjust privilege. The question is then not whether there are ever any penalties for being non–white or female in any contexts or circumstances, but rather how they compare in scale to the penalties which can also exist for being white or male in others—and my claim is that once we perform this kind of analysis more rigorously than mainstream sociology traditionally has, these advantages and penalties are roughly similar: in other words, no one comes out as the obvious winner of the “Oppression Olympics”.

We have already seen that the popular view that whites have a profound advantage over blacks when facing police, in fact, has it exactly backwards: once the fact that black suspects simply do in fact commit more violent crime is taken into account, it turns out that any given black suspect facing police has an advantage over any given white—the white suspect is actually almost twice as likely to end up shot. Similarly, in part 3 of the “Is Dylann Roof ‘White Like Me?’” series I discussed the fact that not only are men more likely to be raped in prison than women are, but white men are much more likely to be raped than non–whites—and almost always by black men, according to mainstream sociological research stretching back for decades. Like it or not, these are “institutional” forms of suffering which give people facing police or spending time in prison penalties both for being white and/or male.

But the analogy of choosing a class in a role–playing game also allows me to clarify how my view differs from that of many conservatives, and of so–called mens’ rights activists, who share my interest in this same set of facts: in sum, these perspectives often simply invert John Scalzi’s argument, without rejecting its fundamentals. According to their schemes, being white or male work just the same way that being non–white or female do in the left–wing social justice warrior’s scheme: they give one disadvantages, plain and simple. My class analogy should make it clear that I consider this view misguided and wrong for exactly the same reasons that I consider the left–wing view misguided and wrong: no demographic is an unequivocal victim in modern society; the advantages and penalties faced in each case are simply different. So, this post will start with me granting the existence of a case of “institutional” racism.

This brings me back to the matter of sentencing lengths. Once the cops have already shown up, and once we’ve already arrived at a conviction, how long are the sentences that different people tend to receive for similar crimes? Is there a penalty (or privilege) for the convicted criminal based on his (or her) race?

From the looks of it, there is. A 2013 study conducted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that blacks’ sentences were about 15% longer than whites’. Much of the early research which found much higher disparities than this failed to take account of the fact that black defendants, on average, have longer rap sheets—which clearly factors in to judicial decisions. A 2012 study conducted by Sonja Starr which controlled meticulously for previous record found a gap of about 10%, to the disadvantage of blacks. Another 2013 study conducted by Beaver, et al. found “no evidence of racial discrimination in criminal justice processing” once matching defendants for self–reported lifetime violence and IQ—so perhaps what often happens is that defendants of lower intelligence behave differently in the courtroom, and judges pass sentences in response to these behavioral differences, not race itself.

But what often happens needn’t be what always happens, and it would be hasty to dismiss the entire literature on the sentencing gap out of hand without a deeper investigation. In a review of the evidence compiled for the time between 1980 and 2000, Tushar Kansal of The Sentencing Project writes that “32 state-level studies contained 95 estimates—meaning 95 different ways in which these studies sought to determine whether sentencing decisions were biased—of the direct effect of race on sentence severity[…, and] 43.2% [of these] indicated harsher sentences for blacks… 8 studies of the federal system contained 22 estimates of the direct relationship between race and sentence severity[…, and] over two-thirds (68.2%) [of these] indicated harsher sentences for blacks ….” In other words, for every ~9 state or federal studies which fail to find a racial disparity against blacks, there are 11 studies which do. The most plausible explanation is that rather than it being a coincidence that 55% of all studies find a racial disparity against blacks, with 45% mostly finding null results, there is a racial disparity—in some but not all times and places. Kansal concludes with an admission that “Despite the findings of the cited studies in the area of direct racial discrimination, a number of factors indicate that the presence of direct discrimination is not uniform and extensive. Some of the state-level studies found no evidence of direct racial discrimination, and many of those that did find evidence of direct discrimination concluded that it exercised relatively modest effects, increasing the likelihood of a minority being sentenced to prison by only a few percentage points. ”

For obtaining an estimate of how large the typical racial sentencing gap is, then, Sonja Starr’s 2013 finding of a 10% gap between blacks and whites represents the middle ground—less than the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 15%; but more than the few percentage point, null, or reverse (that is, favoring blacks and disfavoring whites—of which there were 6) findings reported by 44.3% of the Sentencing Project review’s collection of studies.

Now, what happens when we ask the same question about gender?

“Intersectional theory” is the term for the attempt within sociology to account for the fact that race and gender contribute interacting effects to one’s social disadvantages, rather than investigating each factor in isolation. The consensus is, of course, that being non–white and being non–male are always interacting disadvantages—so that in reality, as one Tumblr author who describes herself as a “genderfluid femme Black mixed bitch” writes, what intersectionality was really always about is “exposing the ways Black women are caught up in multiple systems of oppression … it is meant to help Black women understand their experiences in a white supremacist patriarchal culture [e.g., which is set up to privilege whites and men and therefore especially white men and punish non–whites and non–males and therefore especially minority women] like the U.S.”

The real findings, however, take the intersectional logic and turn that expectation flat on its head.

From 2001–2006, three studies ([1], [2], [3]) all found a gender sentencing gap of about 10%.

But guess who that gap favored?

Women.

Already, the gender sentencing gap favoring women is at least as large as the racial sentencing gap—and therefore just as important. The second of these studies, published by Max Schanzenbach, notes something interesting: “The findings regarding gender in the case of serious offenses are quite striking: the greater the proportion of female judges in a district, the lower the gender disparity for that district … These results are hard to square with the suggestion that unobserved accomplice status or blameworthiness is behind the gender disparity. [However,] appointing more black judges to the bench is unlikely to reduce sentencing disparities for black offenders who commit serious crimes.” In other words, the three takeaways here are: (1) the theory that men organize society to create distinctly male privileges appears in the case of prison sentencing to be absolute bullshit, because when men are given power to hand out sentences, they privilege women, not men; (2) it is unlikely that this sentencing gap is a result of other unobserved variables differentiating the crimes committed by women and men, because male judges give female offenders privileges in sentencing that female judges don’t; and (3) this does not appear to be the case for black/white judges handing out sentences to black/white offenders—black and white judges do not appear to sentence black or white defendants very differently, which at least suggests that most black and white judges are usually responding to the severity of crimes committed when they sentence black and white defendants differently.

By these measures, again, the gender gap in sentencing favoring women is exactly as large as the racial gap in sentencing favoring whites. However, in the Booker vs. United States ruling passed down by the Supreme Court in 2005, it was decided that sentencing guidelines requiring that men and women who committed the same crimes and held similar criminal records be given equally long sentences were to be considered recommendations, rather than requirements—and the evidence shows that the gender sentencing gap grew as a result of this decision. A 2007 study by Supriya Sarnikar found an even larger figure than the aforementioned three: “We find that women receive prison sentences that average a little over 2 years less than those awarded to men. Even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history, women receive more lenient sentences. Approximately 9.5 months of the female advantage cannot be explained by gender differences in individual circumstances. In other words if women faced the same sentencing structure as men, women would on average receive 15.4 months less prison time than men rather than 24.9 months less prison time.”

But importantly, Sarnikar makes this note in her conclusion: “[O]ur data permit us to examine only the end stage of the criminal justice system. A more comprehensive treatment would take account of the fact that before arriving at the judge for sentencing, a defendant must also pass through a jury or possible plea bargain with a prosecutor.”

And that brings us back to Sonja Starr.

In 2012, Starr decided to present an analysis of the gender sentencing gap which accounted for decisions made in the earlier stages of the criminal justice system, just as she had done recently to arrive at her 10% figure for the racial sentencing gap. Her study incorporated data collected from the U.S. Marshals’ Service (USMS), the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA), the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), and the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) spanning from 2001–2009 (containing periods both before and after the equal sentencing for equal crime guidelines were ruled recommended rather than mandatory) and controlled extensively for the severity of crimes committed and the previous criminal records of offenders.

The result? On average, men receive a sentence that is 60% longer than the one a woman would receive for the same crime—and Starr notes that even this number is, in fact, an underestimate, because the average male prison sentence is driven downwards by the presence of men receiving relatively short sentences in cases where women would receive no sentence at all. But already, this is six times as large as the racial sentencing gap of 10% which Sonja Starr had recently found by applying exactly the same methodology to race.

To be specific, the gender gap varies by race: among white offenders, men receive sentences 51% longer than womens’; among black offenders, men receive sentences 74% longer than womens’. But whereas this drags black mens’ sentences down compared to white mens’, it also pulls black womens’ back up—with the end result that black women have the largest advantage in prison sentencing length of all! So much for intersectionality as a method for “exposing the ways Black women are caught up in multiple systems of oppression … in a white supremacist patriarchal culture.” How long before we hear social justice warriors asking black women to check their prison sentencing privilege?

To help visualize this, I’ve created a very oversimplified chart to represent the rough amount of “privilege” each group receives in prison sentencing by starting everyone at 500 points, creating a racial gap of 50 points (10% of 500; so add 25 points if white, and substract 25 points if black), a white gender gap of 255 points (51% of 500; so add 127 points if white female, and subtract 127 points if white male), and a black gender gap of 370 points (74% of 500; so add 185 points if black female, and subtract 185 points if black male). Black men get 290 points; white men get 398; white women get 652; and black women get 660. To translate that into years, if four people all committed identical crimes, then a black man would spend 7 years and 7 months in jail, a white man would spend 6 years and 8 months in jail, a white woman would spend 4 years and 7 months in jail, and a black woman would spend 4 years and 6 months in jail. Lest you think I’ve calculated this incorrectly and arrived at the finding that black women receive the most “privilege” in sentencing by mistake, note that on p.16 of her study (under section 3.6. Race-Gender Interactions), Sonja Starr notes that “among women, the race gap [is] reversed in sign.”

What this means, even given the fact that the gender gap is larger amongst black offenders than it is amongst whites, is thatblack men in the criminal justice system share more in oppression with white men on account of being male than they share in oppression with black women thanks to their race—and white men share more in oppression with black men on account of being male than they share in privilege with white women thanks to their race. If we want to improve the situation of black men in prison, then we should want to make their sentences more like black womens’ rather than more like white mens’.

To describe the implications still yet a few other ways, white men and white women are not united in shared privileges—white women and black women are; whereas it is white men and black men who, relatively speaking, are united in shared “oppression”. Rather than finding white men sitting atop the social pyramid, we find black womenthere instead. And even for black men, clearly the most disadvantaged group of all, addressing the sentencing length penalty for being male should be a much higher priority—about six times higher—than addressing the sentencing length penalty for being black. So in this case, whose efforts do black men need most? Supposedly anti–racist “intersectional” feminists would have it that the racial disparity should be everyone’s priority—but if mens’ rights activists were to instead successfully eliminate the gender sentencing gap first, this would benefit actual living and breathing black men much more than eliminating the racial sentencing gap.

Even where so–called “intersectional feminists” have something right (that the effects of race, gender, and other variables interact), they’ve still failed to bring us the whole picture. While nominally professing concern for the fact that “the patriarchy hurts men too”, it seems as though they would often rather fight wage gaps that don’t exist (except as the result of voluntary career choices and preferences) and narcissistically find ways to make men becoming somewhat less of a majority of the victims of violence a womens’ problem than work to bring to the public’s attention that the relatively little–known gender gap disfavoring men in prison sentencing is six times larger than the well known racial gap disfavoring blacks.

Perhaps that’s because that evidence so drastically undermines the “white male is the easiest difficulty setting; black female is ‘hardcore’” model of American social life by, at least in this instance, turning it all the way around on its head. So, not only are individual white men who commit a crime more likely to be shot by police than individual black men who commit a crime—and not only are white men in jail more likely to be raped (most likely by black men)—but even at the level of sentencing, white men are almost as disadvantaged in sentencing compared to both black and white women as black men are. And even here where black men are the most disadvantaged of all, and that isan “institutional” problem that should be addressed, they would still be more helped by an effort to reduce the gender penalty which also hits white men than they would by an effort to reduce the racial penalty, which only trivially hits black women (who are still despite that penalty by far the most privileged anyway).

One conclusion discoveries like these has brought me to is that it should now be perfectly reasonable to have college classes, think tanks, or student groups dedicated to examining the problems faced by whites, or men—and I stand by that even though I think much that is, or would be, produced by such groups is bunk. Why? First, because a great deal of what is produced by womens’ studies and minority studies is already bunk—but at least a variety of different focus groups could criticize each other well enough to exercise checks and balances against each others’ ideological excesses and help bring awareness of flawed arguments made by the other side to our attention.

But second, because just as there are valid issues faced by women and minorities even amidst the trash often produced by “feminist” and “anti–racist” groups and publications, so there are valid issues faced by men and whites amidst all the trash that “mens’ rights” or white–focused groups would inevitably also produce. Men (or whites) are not “the” oppressed segment of society without exception today any more than women (or non–whites) are. But the types of “oppression” faced by each of these groups are not massively different in kind—and were it not for the fact that feminist and anti–racist organizations alone are allowed to dominate the narrative airways and spread perspectives which are often flawed in ways that few will take the time to deeply examine and of which few people will ever even hear well–informed critiques, the suggestion that groups with opposing perspectives have a valid place would not sound so absurd. The reason we don’t know or hear about the facts which might go some way to validate their existence is because they aren’t here to give them to us. “Intersectional” anti–racist feminists can’t be trusted to do it sufficiently; and that goes for black men, too, whose need for the kind of analysis of the gender sentencing gap that feminists aren’t doing here is even more grave than white mens’ need for it is.

On November 30, 2015, amidst the debate over what should be done about Syrian refugees when one in eight Syrian refugees openly express sympathy with ISIS/ISIL/DAESH, ThinkProgresspublished an article titled “You Are More Than 7 Times As Likely To Be Killed By A Right–Wing Extremist Than By Muslim Terrorists”. Lest anyone be left unclear what they’re trying to say, the byline reads: “The face of terrorism in the United States is white.” As AddictingInfo puts it: “the true terrorist threat: crazy white people.”

Now, these left–wing media outlets may imagine they are attempting to “counter” what they perceive as bias against non–whites, but they have increasingly begun falling off the deep end of blatant misinformation and irrationality in what amounts, in practice, to an extreme bias against mainstream whites. Whether this has occurred as a result of “noble intentions” or not, it’s time for someone to set the record straight; and it’s time to prove that it doesn’t take a paranoid racist to agree with this paragraph—just the ability to read and perform a little basic math.

It obviously never occurred to these authors that white people might be more likely to kill you for the same reason that they’re “more likely” to eat at Mexican restaurants or buy hip–hop albums: the majority of the whole population is white, so everything is “more likely” to be done by a white person—even if white people do it less. This is utterly trivial, and it hardly means anyone is irrational to associate Mexican restaurants with Hispanics or hip–hop with black people instead of whites. Per the highest estimate I can find, Muslims as of 2014 (including native–born converts) were a mere 0.9% of the population. Since white people are currently 63% of the U.S. population, that means there are seventy times more white people in the United States than Muslims. If white people committed the same rate of domestic terrorism as is committed by Muslims, then, we’d expect white people to be seventy times more likely to kill you—there are seventy times more of them.

But that’s not what we find.

Instead, according to the article’s headline, they’re only seven times more likely.

Similarly, this count of the numbers killedin various types of terror attacks finds that non–Muslim attackers had a death toll twice as high as Muslim attackers—and again, since the non–Muslim population in the United States is far more than twice as high as the Muslim population (as Muslims are less than 1% of the population, the non–Muslim population is more than 99 times larger), it’s not clear how any of these outlets can possibly think that these facts downplay the relative risk from Islam–inspired attacks.

If, at 1% of the population, Muslims commit 1/7th the amount of terror attacks as the white 63% of the population does, that means that the Muslim population would only have to reach 7% in order for the amount of terror attacks committed by Muslims to be equal to the amount committed by the white population. And that means that if Muslims were 63% of the population, they’d commit nine times as many terror attacks as the currently white 63% of the population does. Yet, as we’ll see later as we continue to dig through the sources for ThinkProgress’ claim, even these numbers will turn out to dramatically understate the real disparity.

The data behind this claim …

was published by David Sterman of New America, and their full collection of “jihadist” and “right–wing extremist” attacks can be seen here.

The first thing that should be apparent is that according to their actual list, “jihadist” and “right–wing extremists” are already killing an equal number of people despite their population differences—not seven times as many. To revise the above numbers, that means that if Muslims were to become 63% of the population, they’d commit seventy times as many terror attacks as the currently white 63% of the population does.

If we try to control for political ideology, somewhere between around 49–64% of whites lean conservative, so even if we leave aside liberal whites and ignore the fact that left–wing acts of terror take place as well, that’s a bare minimum of thirty times as many per capita terror attacks from the Muslim 0.9% of the population as come from the white conservative ~30% of the population.

But left–wing terrorism exists too.

Based on sheer number of attacks, environmentalists and animal rights activists together committed 78 of the known total of 178 — about 44% of all attacks. (Do note that their dataset, from the Global Terrorism Database, differs from David Sterman’s data at New America in that it cuts off at the end of 2014, whereas Sterman’s data has been updated to include most of 2015—however, Sterman’s data doesn’t include any breakdown whatsoever of the ideology of non–jihadists whom it doesn’t classify as “right–wing extremists”.)

Now, environmentalists and animal rights activists are high on the list of numbers of attacks, but low on the list of casualties—true. But so are anti–abortion activists: out of 13 anti–abortion attacks across all 13 years, only 1 actual “anti–abortion” casualty accrued. And the environmentalists are still entering media outlet buildings and holding people at gunpoint while threatening to shoot them in order to spread the message that “All human procreation must cease!” even if they don’t actually have the nerve to go through with shooting anyone, so this isn’t all just innocent tree–hugging and property damage.

The two “atheist” attacks did center around property damage—as with the “Veterans United for Non–Religious Memorials” group’s placement of an IED on a Christian memorial. But one “anti–Muslim” attack committed less than two months later arguably deserves to be classified as an atheist terror attack, given that its perpetrator was Craig Stephen Hicks, a liberal fan of progressive causes ranging from “HuffPost Black Voices” to “Forward Progressives” to “The Atheist Empathy Campaign,” to Rachel Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center whose Facebook cover photo loudly proclaimed his identification as an “anti–theist” in bold capital letters. Thus, even “anti–Muslim” attacks cannot simply be assumed to have been committed by “right–wingers”. In fact, if we were to update the list through 2015 to include Craig Stephen Hicks and Robert Dear, atheist terrorists (at 3) would be only a single kill behind the tally for anti–abortion terrorists (at 4) from 2001 through 2015. As a non–religious person myself, this was absolutely surprising to me, so let me repeat it again: atheist terrorists have killed only one fewer person within the United States over the last decade and a half than anti–abortion activists.

The difference between liberal and conservative responses to Frein and Dorner is that no white conservative was heard saying of Frein that his continued run from police was “kind of exciting,” much less that he was “like a real–life superhero”, as viewers of CNN had the opportunity to hear from Marc Lamont Hill, the Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Columbia University while Dorner’s killing spree was still ongoing. Meanwhile, the largest “Support Eric Frein” page on Facebook has 404 likes; the largest Facebook page in support of Christopher Dorner has more than 17,000.

Of all terror attacks against police: the first, in February of 2013, belongs to Christopher Dorner (who claimed four victims in total, two of whom were police officers—note that this data only lists one of his victims in its tally, since his designated category is “anti–police” but only two of his victims were police officers, and only one of them died immediately). Gregory Lynn Shrader mailed a bomb to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, apparently in hopes of framing an ex–business partner rather than out of any ideological motivation of his own. David Patterson planted three explosive devices around a West Virginia city building in hopes of orchestrating a shootout with the FBI. The next attack, claiming five victims, was committed by Jerad and Amanda Miller, apparently libertarian followers of Facebook pages like “Taxation is Theft” and “Cop Block”. The next act, claiming no victims or casualties or property damage of any kind, was committed by Douglas Leguin, a member of the Sovereign Citizens movement.

The next attack, in October of 2014, was committed by Zale Thompson—a recent convert to Islam—who killed one NYPD officer and injured three more individuals in a hatchet attack. Note that this attack is registered as “anti–police” rather than “Islamic” terrorism, despite the fact that Thompson was known to have frequented websites related to al–Qaeda, al–Shabab, and ISIS. In November of 2014, Larry McQuilliams claimed one victim in Austin, Texas. Finally, in December, Ismaaiyl Brinsley killed two police officers after tweeting “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours….. Let’s Take 2 Of Theirs … #RIPMikeBrown … ” — obviously inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement’s completely distorted popularization of a case of justified self–defense, in an environment in which BLM protesters were chanting the phrase, “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.”

Of total anti–police attacks, then, 5 out of 8 — or 62% — were committed by whites—and this is not larger than whites’ 63% representation in the population. 1 out of 8 — or 13% — were Islamic, which is larger than Islam’s 1% representation of the U.S. population. And 3 out of 8 — or 37% — were committed by African–Americans, which exceeds blacks’ 13% representation in the population. Of total victims claimed, 7 were killed by white attackers (5 from Jerad and Amanda Miller; 1 from Larry McQuilliams; and 1 from Eric Frein), while a combined 7 were killed by black attackers (4 from Christopher Dorner, 2 from Ismaaiyl Brinsley, and 1 from Zale Thompson). Black attackers were thus responsible for 50% of deaths in this category—counting only those police deaths which formally classified as “terrorism”, and leaving out killings of police which happen in pursuit of a crime (which black suspects are also extremely disproportionately represented in).

Who attacks government or military targets?

Of a total of 49 attacks on “general” or “diplomatic” government targets, 2 were committed by the environmentalist Earth Liberation Front. Of 32 anti–government attacks taking place between November 12, 2001 and February of 2009, none claim a single fatality, and only one managed to claim a single injury.

In May of 2002, Luke Helder began a series of pipe bombings that were conducted along with messages about astral projection, as well as the illegality of marijuana—the message accompanying his bomb attacks read: “I?m here to help you realize/ understand that you will live no matter what! It is up to you people to open your hearts and minds. There is no such thing as death”, and made allusion to left–wing redistributionist arguments: “When 1% of the nation controls 99% of the nations total wealth, is it a wonder why there are control problems?”

Because of the different locations, these actually classify as the first eighteen events on the count. If we count these as one event, there were only 32 total attacks on government targets during the time period for which we have data after the September 11 attacks. (Let’s not use Luke Helder to artificially inflate the number of more–left–wing–than–right–wing attacks.)

After Luke Helder’s bombings, the first unique attack on government target was committed by Preston Lit, a mentally ill man off his medication who planted a small pipe bomb with a “Free Palestine” message containing scattered references to al–Qaeda. The bomb was defused, and Lit was sentenced to a federal prison psychiatric unit. Next, the Earth Liberation Front set fire to the U.S. Forest Service Northeast Research Station Pennsylvania, causing $700,000 in damage. Steve Kim, a U.S. born East Asian man, then fired shots at the U.N. building in Manhattan in October of 2002 along with what was described as a “rambling political message” about human rights in North Korea.

Then in March of 2003, Dwight Watson caused a several–hour long halt to traffic by driving his truck into a pond in order to call attention to federal policies he considered unfair to tobacco farmers. In October, a ricin–laced latter was sent to the Department of Transportation in Washington, DC threatening more ricin–laced letters if pending trucking legislation wasn’t passed by someone calling himself “Fallen Angel” and claiming to be the “fleet owner of a tanking company”; in November, a second letter was sent.

From February to May of 2004, there were a series of attacks incurring no casualties perpetrated by unknown individuals for unknown reasons: Senate majority leader Bill Frist was sent a letter filled with ricin; a fertilizer bomb was placed outside a county courthouse in California; anthrax was discovered at a mail facility in Virginia; and two homemade grenades were thrown at a building housing the British Consulate in New York City. In May, an arson attack committed by Arthur Gladd and Robert Hurley makes the list although it had no discernible political motive. There are no attacks on government targets from here through to October of 2007, when two hand grenades were thrown at the Mexican Consulate in New York City, once again by unknown perpetrators, once again claiming no damage other than that done to the building’s windows. Again, there are no attacks until February of 2009, when a bomb attached to the car of the head of the Arkansas panel that licenses doctors exploded in his driveway, injuring one person.

Finally, in February of 2010, a real “terrorist” attack takes place when Joseph Stack committed suicide crashing his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing the IRS manager Vernon Hunter and injuring 15. Was Stack a “right–wing extremist”, then? Here are a few collections of statements from his suicide letter: “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in. … The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”

No, Stack was not a “right–wing extremist,” and his suicide attack was obviously motivated far more by direct personal grievances over the fact that IRS policies had sent his entire life through a series of setbacks than it was about political ideology per se.

In November of that year, Yonathan Melaku, a naturalized American citizen and Marine Corps Reserve Lance Corporal originally from Ethiopia, was arrested for a series of shootings originally thought unrelated. He was found with a notebook containing references to the Taliban and Bin Laden, and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In January of 2011, two packages were sent to the offices of Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Transportation Secretary Beverly Swaim–Staley protesting the appearance of street signs urging motorists to report suspicious activity, burning one employee’s fingers. (The data lists these two packages as two separate events because they were sent to two separate locations, and if we count them as one, we’re down to 31 total attacks on government targets). That same month, an unclaimed envelope addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ignited at a postal sorting facility.

There are then no further attacks on government targets until November of 2012, when Iraqi civilian Abdullatif Ali Aldosary set off a homemade explosive outside a social security building in Arizona. Later, an unclaimed explosive device went off outside the Tacoma Community Justice Center building in Washington state. Actress Shannon Richardson was arrested in July of 2014 for sending a series of ricin–laced letters to President Barack Obama during 2013 (which were all, of course, intercepted before they ever came anywhere close to the President). The data counts her letters as two separate incidents, and if we count them as one, we’re down even further to 30 unique attacks across this whole time period. In November of 2013, Paul Ciancia killed one TSA agent in a politically motivated attack against the TSA, and was found with a note containing references to New World Order conspiracy theories. David Patterson and Larry McQuilliams both appear here again from our anti–police attack list (for the same attacks) in May and November of 2014 (McQuilliams’ one attack shows up twice, which again brings our total down to 29 attacks if we count them as one—or down to 27 if we remove both of them, since we’ve already counted them).

Finally, there are two remaining attacks in 2014. In June, Dennis Marx—associated with the Sovereign Citizens movement—opened fire on a county courthouse in Georgia, accruing no casualties. And in September, Eric King—a left–wing vegan anarchist—threw two Molotov cocktails into the office of U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver “in solidarity with Ferguson, Mo” and to “memorialize those who died in Chile under the reign of a U.S.–backed dictator and lives lost in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.”

Thus, of 27 unique attacks on government targets not already counted, the vast majority were unclaimed and incurred no casualties, and several were conducted out of a personal vengeance of interest of some kind or another, rather than out of any explicitly political motivation. Of those with a known political motivation, Luke Helder’s don’t fit neatly into any ordinary political division, but are clearly more left–wing than right–wing. Preston Lit’s pipe bombing was committed along with the message to “Free Palestine” and references to al–Qaeda, but likely had more to do with mental illness than politics. Steve Kim’s attack had something to do with human rights in North Korea. Joseph Stack criticized both “corporate profits” and politicians; both the communist and capitalist “creed”. John Patrick Bedell was about as stereotypical as a libertarian can possibly get, literally advocating for currency based on the value of a gram of marijuana. Yonathan Melaku was fascinated with al–Qaeda, although his attack was likely spurred in large part by his schizophrenia. Shannon Richardson opposed gun control policies. Paul Ciancia believed in “New World Order” conspiracy theories. Dennis Marx was a member of the Sovereign Citizens movement, and Eric King was a left–wing vegan anarchist.

Now we should add to this list the six attacks on military targets taking place across the same period of time. In March of 2003, the Earth Liberation Front vandalized government trucks and set one truck on fire, leaving behind the spray–painted message to “Leave Iraq.” Later that month, Eid Elwirelwir, a Venezuelan–born Muslim U.S. citizen, crashed into the barricade gate of an air force reserve base in California, claiming that he “supports Saddam Hussein’s right to use weapons of mass destruction if invaded”. An attack whose perpetrator and cause was unknown took place in March of 2008. In June of 2009, Abdulhakim Muhammad shot two soldiers outside a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one of them, and declaring in letters that “Far as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula … yes, I’m affiliated with them. … Our goal is to rid the Islamic world of idols and idolaters, paganism and pagans, infidelity and infidels, hypocrisy and hypocrites, apostasy and apostates, democracy and democrats, and relaunch the Islamic caliphate … and to establish Islamic law (Shari’ah).” In November of 2009, of course, Nidal Hassan opened fire on fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and injuring 32. The final member of the list of Yonathan Melaku, who we’ve already counted.

So: of all attacks on government or military targets of any kind listed in which the identity of the attacker is known and there was any reason to believe there was actually a political motivation, a grand total of four can even be loosely said to have been committed by “right–wing extremists”(assuming very generously that we can count Joseph Stack who criticized both “corporate profits” and politicians, and both the communist and capitalist “creed”; and Paul Ciancia who apparently believed in “New World Order” conspiracy theories as “right–wing extremists” — the unambiguous cases are John Patrick Bedell and Dennis Marx). The total death count between all four of them? Dennis Marx: 0 (1 injured); Paul Ciancia: 1 (4 wounded); John Patrick Bedell: 0 (2 wounded); Joseph Stack: 1 (15 injured). Including only the clear cases of actual “right–wing extremism” brings this tally to 1 death and 7 injuries; generously stretching the definition of “right–wing extremism” to include Stack brings it to 2 deaths and 22 injuries.

That death count is outdone more than six times over by Nidal Hassan alone, even if we include Stack(which we shouldn’t, because he was not a “right–wing extremist” in any way, shape, or form).

But let’s get back to the New America Foundation’s data.

Their list of “deadly right–wing attacks” counts 18 attacks, for a total of 48 persons killed. How many of these counts are valid? Defining “jihadist” violence is usually quite clear—when Tashfeen Malik pledges allegiance to ISIS on social media before a shooting spree, there’s no question that that attack was motivated by her interpretation of Islam and allegiance to a specific terrorist group espousing that interpretation. But defining when someone’s views count as “conservative” is a little murkier, as we saw above in the discussion of people like Joseph Stark, whose suicide letter criticizes politicians, sure—but criticizes them for failing to reign in “corporate profits”, and ends with “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” And indeed, the New America Foundation’s list includes Joseph Stark as a supposed “right–wing extremist”—which is immediately suspect.

Going through them in chronological order, then, they list Wade and Christopher Lay, who wanted to avenge those in the federal government responsible for the siege on the Branch Davidians at Waco; Jim David Adkisson, who attacked a Unitarian Universalist church and whose manifesto explicitly labeled the attack a “hate crime”, saying “I hate the damn left–wing liberals”; and Keith Luke, a confessed Neo–Nazi.

Next on the list, however, are Albert Gaxiola, Shawna Forde, and Joshua Bush. The entry tells us that they “killed a man and his nine-year old daughter during an armed robbery of the man’s house … to help fund their anti-immigrant organization.” However, digging even slightly deeper quickly reveals that “Gaxiola wanted Flores dead because he was a rival drug smuggler”. Including these three in a list of “right–wing extremism”, then, makes about as much logical sense as saying that people who wish for an end to the War on Drugs are more likely to kill you by putting members of Mexican cartels who kill their white drug–dealing competitors into the analysis, as if this could possibly tell you anything about liberals or libertarians who wish for an end to the drug war. The problem with that wouldn’t be that violent members of Mexican cartels are a minority of those who call for an end to the drug war—it would be that their violence is about self–interest, not politics. Were a cartel member to kill the head of the DEA to send a message, that would count as political terrorism from someone calling for an end to the drug war.

After that, we have Scott Roeder, the member of the Sovereign Citizens movement who assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller; followed by James Von Brunn, a neo–Nazi who killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. But after those two, we’re already back to yet another questionable inclusion. While Robert Poplawskiwasa member of Stormfront, “believed in conspiracy theories that the Jews were behind an imminent collapse of the United States”, and “was busy preparing for the violent collapse of society”, and (to be clear) he deserves no sympathy for these views, the actual “terror attack” happened when Poplawski’s mother called 911 to have him removed after a dispute that was apparently over a dog urinating in the house. Recently unemployed, and panicked at the idea of being thrown out of his home, Poplawski—who already had a reputation for getting into fights with neighbors—fired at and killed the arriving police.

Poplawski had repulsive political views, and it goes without saying that he committed a horrendous action—he killed in cold blood innocent police officers who did nothing more than arrive at his household in response to a domestic disturbance call. But the action was not one he committed in any sense whatsoever in order to propagate his ideological views—it was not “terrorism.” After four hours, Poplawski surrendered, saying “I don’t want to end any more officers’ lives … I’m not going to shoot any more innocent officers. … You know, I’m a good kid, officer … This is really an unfortunate occurrence, sir.”

Next on the list is, of course, Joseph Stack—who as we’ve discussed more than once now already, was nowhere close to “right–wing extremist.” After Stack, Raymond Peake appears on the list for killing a man at a gun show and stealing his rifle. He qualifies to appear on this list apparently because at one point he told one investigator that he “stole the weapon for use in an organization seeking the overthrow of the American government that he refused to name”—an organization that we have no evidence outside of this one statement even exists. Even Timothy Lively, the detective on the case, didn’t buy the story, stating that he “believed the gun theft was the motive for the killing.”

That’s four out of nine cases so far—almost a quarter of the total—representing 7 out of 14 total deaths spanning from May of 2004 to October of 2010 that either were not acts of “terrorism” or were committed by people whose views were not “right–wing” at all.

The rest of the list fares better. The FEAR Militia killed a soldier who knew of their plans to target political figures; neo–Nazi Michael Wade Page opened fire at a Sikh temple; seven members of the Sovereign Citizens movement were indicted for ambushing a police officer who was investigating their activity; David Pederson and Holly Grigsby killed four people in association with a white supremacist criminal enterprise; Eric Frein has already been discussed; Glenn Cross, member of the KKK, killed three people at a Jewish center; Jerad and Amanda Miller, as discussed, were libertarian fans of “Taxation is Theft” and “Cop Block”; Dylann Roof was inspired by racist websites after discovering facts about the relative rates of interracial crime; and finally, Robert Dear killed three people outside a Planned Parenthood in Colorado.

If we subtract the four cases which were either not “terrorism” or not committed by “right–wing extremists”, we come to a tally of 14 “right–wing extremist” attacks representing 41 deaths, in comparison to 9 “jihadist” attacks representing 45 deaths. So what a proper count of this list actually shows is that Islamic terrorists are 1.1 times more likely to kill you than a “right–wing extremist”, not that they are seven times less.

Plugging that back in to our earlier numbers, that means that if the Muslim 0.9% of the population were to become equal in number to the white 63% of the population, they would commit 77 times more terrorism than the white 63% of the population currently does. But even this is still a slight underestimate, because the white percentage of the population has gradually been shrinking, and 63% is a new low that has been reached only recently—most of these acts were committed when the white population was closer to 75% of the U.S. total.

Not to mention the fact that this list doesn’t include foiled plots, which therefore exactly begs the question of whether the amount of focus we place on Islamic terrorism is justified or not.

If Islamic terrorism is only as low as it is because we’ve paid a greater amount of attention to it and therefore stopped a larger number of Islamic attacks, then it is absolutely rubbish reasoning to point to the resulting number of successful Islamic attacks as evidence that our focus on Islamic terrorism has been misplaced.

In Wikipedia’s list of foiled Islamic terror plots just during Obama’s first term in office from 2008 to 2012, we see 13 names: “James Cromitie et al., Najibullah Zazi et al., Michael Finton, Hosam Maher and Husein Smadi, Colleen LaRose et al., Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, Faisal Shahzad, Farooque Ahmed, Rezwan Ferdaus, Sami Osmakac, Amine El Khalifi, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul, Ahsan Nafis.” As far as the “white–sounding names” on this list, James Cromitie (also known as Abdul Rahman) was a member of a group composed of four Muslim men, three African–Americans, and one Haitian immigrant who planned to plant bombs in two synagogues and fire missiles at airplanes leaving the Air National Guard base in New York; Michael Finton (also known as Talib Islam) who attempted to bomb the Paul Findley Federal Building and a Congressman’s office, considered Nidal Hassan and Anwar Awlaki heroes according to his MySpace page; and Colleen LaRose (also known as Fatima LaRose) was a Muslim convert convicted of—amongst other things—plotting to kill the Swedish artist Lars Vilks for drawing a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

A paper published in November of 2010, “The Plots that Failed: Intelligence Lessons Learned from Unsuccessful Terrorist Attacks Against the United States”, created the most thorough known compilation of all 176 terror plots that have taken place over the last 25 years, and found that “about 75 percent of the plots are associated with radical Islamists and about 25 percent are from right-wing domestic, anti-government militia movements.” That’s 132 out of 176 attacks associated with Islam even when we’re including the pre–911 era—or about 7 foiled Islamic terror attacks each year compared to just 1.8 foiled “right–wing” attacks each year. In other words, the disparity between foiled “jihadist” and “right–wing” attacks is obviously much higher than the disparity found within successful attacks.

In the 14 years since 911, there have been (according to this list) 67 foiled Islamic terror plots. According to Erik Dahl’s comprehensive data, if these 14 years were average, there will have been about 28 foiled “right–wing extremist” attacks. How different would the data in the New America Foundation’s list have looked if instead of 9 deadly “jihadist” attacks and 14 deadly “right–wing extremist attacks”, we were looking at 76 “jihadist” attacks with the potential to turn deadly and only 42 “right–wing extremist” attacks with a similar potential?

To revise our earlier calculations one last time,

Per that number we would have the 0.9% of the population that is Muslim committing 1.8 times as many terror attacks as the 63% of the population that is white (or the 30% that is both white and conservative). At that rate, Muslims commit 126 times as many terror attacks per capita as the white population currently does.

ThinkProgress’ claim that “UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times [that] Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years” [whereas] “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities” leads here, and the paragraph in that article quotes as the source for the claim “a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.”

Arie Perliger explains on pp.85–86 of this report that “The dataset includes violence against human targets as well as property … based on … relevant information drawn from … the SPLC hate crime dataset.”

It is therefore immediately obvious that we are not comparing apples and oranges here, and it will surely come as a surprise to readers of “ThinkProgress” that white people do not even commit a disproportionate number of officially designated hate crimes. The most recent data we have is from 2013, when Hispanic perpetrators of crime were still being classified as “white”—and according to that data, “whites” (which means whites and Hispanics) committed 52% of all hate crimes in 2013—even though whites and Hispanics together in 2013 represented 77% of the U.S. population. If whites (and Hispanics) committed the same rate of hate crimes as all other groups, we would expect them to commit 77% of all hate crimes—but instead, they commit significantly less than that. Meanwhile, the report tells us that 24% of all hate crimes in the United States in 2013 were committed by people identifying as black or African–American—even though African–Americans represent just 13% of the U.S. population.

I’ll leave aside the blatant dishonesty of comparing a tally of organized, deadly jihadist attacks with organized right–wing attacks and petty hate–crimes while hiding the actual source of this data in another article without referring back to it directly. Even if you include hate crimes in this analysis, neither the face of terrorism nor hate crimes in the United States turn out to be white.

(1) The violent crime rate presents us with an effective way of estimating how frequently police are having justified encounters with individuals from varying racial demographic groups. If we want to ask whether police treat individuals who belong to some racial demographic groups whom they encounter differently from others, it simply doesn’t matter in the slightest what racial percentage of the general population those individuals represent—for exactly the same reason that it does not matter in the slightest for the purpose of this analysis that 22% of the world population is black whereas only 5% of the world population is white. What matters is how many members of these racial demographic groups police are encountering on a regular basis. And the answer to the question, “Who is committing the violent crime?” tells us not only how often police are likely to be encountering members of different racial demographic groups, but how often they are justified to by the fact that addressing violent crime is the primary job and purpose of police.

(2) We are, thankfully, not reliant on police arrest data alone to determine how frequently members of various racial demographic groups are committing violent crimes. In addition to that data, we have a federal collection of eye–witness data from both victims and third–party witnesses stretching back for decades in the form of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) collected and available online at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD)—and this data reveals that victims and witnesses have recorded a higher percentage of black perpetrators committing violent crimes than are found in police arrest data consistently for years. It therefore turns out that the disparity in arrest rates understates how disproportionately black perpetrators are responsible for violent crimes. Even though African–Americans are just 13% of the population, approximately a full 50% of the United States’ murders are committed by perpetrators who are black. And since most of these are committed by younger black males, who make up less than 6.5% of the population, the disparity is even worse than it seems. Whether this is, as liberals would have us believe, solely because of the influence of poverty or not, the reason why this disparity exists is simply irrelevant to the analysis itself. At least part of the explanation, in any case, is neither particularly “conservative” nor “liberal” in its implications—most violent crimes are committed by males between the ages of 18–25, and the African–American population in the United States skews much younger than others do, which means males in the crime–prone age demographic make up a larger percentage of the African–American population than they do of other racial demographic groups.

(3) When we compare the per capita rate of violent offenses committed against the per capita rate at which police shoot and kill suspects of differing demographic groups (whether these shootings are justified or unjustified), not only does the disparity between African–Americans’ representation of the population and their representation in such shooting deaths disappear, but in fact it turns out that the trend reverses to the point that per justified encounter with police, African–Americans are in fact less likely to be shot by a police either during an attempt to commit a crime or while being legitimately suspected of one (because a suspect is known to be black). In other words, African–Americans commit a substantially larger number of violent crimes, and have a substantially higher number of valid encounters with police, before any one African–American ever ends up shot by police—while more white and even Hispanic suspects will be shot before they have committed nearly as many crimes or had nearly as many justified encounters with policemen approaching them during, or questioning them about violent crimes.

(4) Not only does that hold true in the extant national numbers, but it turns out that that finding actually also confirms what we have found in the most thorough experimental study data collected so far: police hesitate more before shooting black suspects in experimental trials which actually control rigorously for individual behavior by ensuring that the only difference between the virtual “suspects” these police have to make a decision to either fire or not fire at is race (unlike the real world, where this behavior absolutely inevitably differs on average).

Now, there isin fact some validity to the critique that I chose a questionable data–set for my argument in point (3), when I selected data regarding how many members of different racial groups are shot and killed by police, even if the data I selected for point (2) regarding how often members of different racial groups commit violent crime was correct and accurate. It is true: I chose numbers at this stage of the argument that vastly underestimate the number of police shootings that take place each year. However, this still does not ultimately weaken my final argument—it strengthens it. I should have clarified up front in the original essay what my reasons were for choosing to use the CDC’s data on what it calls “death by legal intervention” for this stage of the argument even though it clearly underestimates the total number of shootings each year.

The reason I chose this particular data–set is: (a) because I knew that my argument was strong enough that any existing data–set that can be plugged into it will produce the same bottom–line conclusion; quite simply, by no estimate anyone has made is the statistically disproportionate rate at which African–Americans are shot by police anywhere close to the disproportionate rate at which African–Americans are responsible for violent crime; and (b) because what matters for this stage of the argument is not the raw numbers, but rather the relative percentages of black, white, and other individuals found in its data—and the CDC data actually identifies a relatively large disproportion towards black “deaths by legal intervention” even compared to more accurate data.

In short, whereas the study of CDC data I used for my original argument found that blacks were 34% of deaths by “legal intervention”, the more accurate and recent data only places this relative number at 21%. (Update: I’m confused by what is going on in this data now. They claim that 21% of their 1600 victims are black whereas 32% were white, but this would mean 336 blacks versus 512 whites (to which we’d also have to add Hispanics), and that isn’t what I count when I count the entries they include under race myself; I count 390 blacks in 2013 alone, and 597 whites in that same year. To be as cautious as absolutely possible, I have removed the previous numbers—which found that whites+Hispanics were 175% as likely to be shot in a given encounter with police as blacks—and replaced them with my own count, even though I’m not sure why the two differ, and it could be that their summary is accurate and that my count is not. In any case, also bear in mind that this new estimate—which still does support my argument, anyway—is biased downwards by the inclusion of Hispanics, who have a higher per capita crime rate than whites.)

(Old paragraph: Substituting more accurate data, then, will actually lessen the relative percentage of black compared to white “deaths by legal intervention”, even if it increases both absolute numbers. And it thereby renders the point actually made in my conclusion even more solid—the data I originally chose artificially strengthened the liberal narrative that I was arguing against; not my own conclusions.For the original essay, I checked this against more thorough data before ever publishing what I had written; but during my early investigations into the question, I had typed out what happens to the CDC data in that calculation simply for my own benefit—and once I saw that the same conclusion is reached no matter what data we use, I went ahead and published what I had already had conveniently typed out anyway. It was a mistake to do this without explaining what happened thoroughly.)

To rectify this mistake now, I’m going to take the highest unofficial estimates of how many police shootings, whether justified or unjustified, take place each year that exists anywhere and re–run the original analysis I made in the third step of that argument to show that the same conclusion is still so thoroughly established that it would take an epidemic of black individuals shot by police invisible to all anecdotal, media, orofficial reports that exist anywherein order to reverse the trend I’ve identified. In other words, an actualconspiracy theory.

The highest estimate for those numbers that exists anywhere, the data informally collected at the Killed By Policedatabase, brings it to about 1,100 per year, or 2.6 police shootings each day. To get the years’ end tally of how many of these individuals belonged to which racial category, I pulled compiled data from an analysis here.

Note that everything that follows will use 2013–2014 numbers, and recall that in order to fit this data into my analysis, we’re going to have to lump Hispanics killed by police in with “whites” killed by police. Why? Because until some time in the middle of 2015, the federal data on crime offending classified Hispanic perpetrators as white. If we compare the rate of “white” victims of police shootings to the rate of crimes committed by “whites+Hispanics”, then, our numbers will compare apples and oranges; to make the comparison meaningful, our only choice is to compare the rate of “white+Hispanic” victims of police shootings with the rate of “white+Hispanic” violent crimes. Again, as I demonstrate in the original essay, this actually once again turns out to strengthen my analysis in the end, because it inflates the actual white per capita rate of crime. In the meantime, I’ll use the phrase “non–black” to refer to this combined “white+Hispanic” number. So while the report identifies 597 white victims and 390 black victims in its tally, we must add the 251 Hispanic to the white tally to obtain the appropriate numbers for the purposes of this calculation:390 black to 848 “non–black” persons shot by police.

And with that, we can finally plug these numbers back in to my original calculation:

390 black deaths out of a black population of 37,685,848 equals 0.0000010349% of that total population shot by police, or 1.03 deaths per 100,000 black individuals.

848 non–black deaths out of a non–black population of 271,059,650 equals 0.00000031284% of that total population shot by police, or 0.3128 deaths per 100,000 “non–black” individuals.

Using the official arrest data for 2013 collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (which we have established underestimates the rate at which black perpetrators are disproportionately responsible for violent crime, according to victim and witness reports spanning across decades), the 2013 violent crime rate per 100,000 people for black individuals is 465.7, while the 2013 violent crime rate per 100,000 people for “non–black” individuals is 122.7.

Thus, as before, dividing the second number by the first number gives us the rate of police shootings per violent crime committed, and therefore of police shootings per police encounter with a member of that racial demographic group justified by violent crimes committedby that group.

The “black” rate is therefore 465.7 divided by 1.035, or 449.95.

The “non–black” rate is 122.7 divided by .3128, or 392.26.

In other words, black individuals will commit about 450 violent crimes before any one black individual will end up shot by police—whereas “non–black” individuals will commit about 392 violent crimes before any one “non–black” individual will end up shot by police. In other words, police will encounter 15% more violent or legitimately suspected black individuals before shooting one—and conversely encounter 13% fewer violent or legitimately suspected “non–black” individuals before shooting one. The “non–black” suspects end up getting shot faster.

Reducing those numbers down to make them more comprehensible, the proportions are as if police shot one out of every seven black individuals they encounter in the line of duty, but one out of every six “non–black” individuals (6:7 is the smallest possible 15% increase, so this makes the situation of blacks and “non–blacks” with respect to each other easier to visualize even though police shootings obviously do not happen at this frequency.) Once violence is accounted for, the numbers are in blacks’ favor—not against it.

To arrive at these same numbers by a different means, the likelihood that a black individual committing a crime will end up shot by police is 1/450, or 0.0022, while the likelihood that a “non–black” individual committing a crime will end up shot by police is 1/694, or 0.0025. The likelihood that a “non–black” individual legitimately suspected of committing a crime will end up shot by police is therefore an additional 0.0003 larger than the likelihood that a black individual legitimately suspected of committing a crime will—and since that 0.0003 increase is 15% of the original baseline value of 0.0022 for the likelihood that a black individual legitimately suspected of committing a crime will be shot by police, this again means that non–black individuals who encounter police are 15% morelikely to be shot during the course of that interaction.

Black individuals end up shot by police out of proportion to their population rate, then, because black individuals commit violent crimes out of all proportion to their population rate, and because police therefore end up in a disproportionate number of encounters with black individuals for perfectly justified reasons; not because police are more likely to shoot any given black individual they come into contact with due to subliminal racism—because in fact, once again, the data once properly controlled for actually demonstrates exactly the opposite.

On a related note,

Another set of data I’ve presented has been critiqued on very similar grounds—and once again, while there is validity to this critique, correcting it only serves to strengthen my case. In the fourth entry to the “Is Dylann Roof “White Like Me?”” series, I wrote: “It’s worth making a comparison of the relative rates of police brutality and black–on–white violence in the United States to try to put things in perspective. According to the FBI, there were an average of 14,545 murders per year across the years of 2011–2013. which comes out to an average just shy of 40 murders per day. Since African–Americans commit approximately half of those, and pick white victims about 1/5th of the time, that means there are about four black–on–white murders every day in the United States. White perpetrators commit the other half of murders in the United States, but only choose black victims about 2.4% of the time—which means there is slightly less than one white–on–black murder in the United States every two days.

According to data that does not take statistics reported by police departments for granted, but in fact calls them into question, based on data from the early months of 2015, police kill approximately 2.6 subjects per day—approximately half of which are black, which brings the number down to 1.3 police shootings of black suspects per day. Of this number, it is unclear how many are justified or unjustified. According to the FBI, in 2013 police were attacked by someone carrying a weapon roughly 10,000 times—2,200 of those times with a firearm. If police kill 2.6 suspects per day every day for a year, that’s still only about 1000 total killings at the end of the year. Some liberal readers may point to gaps in the data (call it the “racism of the gaps” strategy) and insist on disagreeing, but if police are killing suspects far less frequently than they’re being attacked by them, it seems safe to me to bet that the vastmajority of those killings are probably justified.

However, even if we assume that every single one of them was unjustified, combining the number of police shootings of black suspects per day (1.3) with the number of white murders of black victims per day (0.48) would still give us a smaller number (~1.8) than the number of black murders of white victims every day in the United States (~4). More than twice as many black murderers are choosing white victims as the number of white murderers choosing black victims and the number of police shooting black suspects (justified or not) combined.(Meanwhile, there are 16 black murders of black victims every single day across the United States—more thaneight times the number of white civilian murders and justified or unjustified police shootings of black victims combined.)”

(I continued: “However, both of these statistics really still need to be taken account of in terms of the wider context that murder only accounts for 0.6% of the deaths in the United States in general. While there are approximately 40 murders, 4 of which are black–on–white, on a typical day in the United States, on the same day 90 Americans will die in car crashes, 110 will commit suicide, 120 will overdose on drugs, 256 will die in accidental falls or other accidents, 1580 will die of cancer and more than 1600 will die of heart attacks. If Roof is concerned about “saving the white race,” then Burger King, cigarettes, drunk driving, wobbly ladders and clinical depression are far more formidable foes than black criminals. But what goes for Roof’s underlying logic goes for “#blacklivesmatter,” too. Tim Wise is right that it’s only a tiny fraction of the black population who commits an act of violence in any given year—the only problem with that is the hypocritical inconsistency we can well know to expect should anyone say the same about racist attacks against black Americans, whether committed by civilians or police, which even combined are still yet only half the size of the fraction of black citizens committing acts of violence Wise himself has just called “tiny.” Whatever goes for the relative insignificance of disproportionate black–on–white violence goes at least twice as much for both white–on–black and police–on–black violence combined. And it goes even more so for hysteria about mass shootings, which make up only 0.2% of that 0.6% of deaths in America.”)

In fact, these numbers overestimated what percentage of police shootings are of black suspects—once again in order to artificially strengthen the claims I am presenting arguments against. Where I granted the assumption that 50% of the 1,100 yearly (or 2.6 daily) police shootings are of black suspects, in fact, as detailed above, the actual range falls somewhere between 21–34% (and closer to the lower of those numbers in more accurate, and recent, sets of data)—rather than 550 black suspects shot by police each year, we’re actually talking about fewer than 150.

Likewise, when I quoted these paragraphs on Reddit, the top criticism claimed that my implications must be incorrect because I’ve portrayed the situation as if only black and white individuals commit murder. But once again, I arrived at these numbers by starting from the established knowledge that black perpetrators commit half of the national total and then lumping all the rest of the murders in as “white” in order once again to artificially strengthen the case I was critiquing. Not only are there apparently 72% fewer total shootings of black suspects than I assumed in this calculation—instead of 4 police shootings of black suspects every three days, the most damning data suggests an average of only 2 police shootings of black suspects every five days—but every murder committed by an East or South Asian or member of any other non–white, non–black ethnic group subtracts from the white number of murders of either white or black victims which I assume, not from the black number. My simplification of the numbers drastically strengthens the left–wing case which I have attacked; they do not distort the facts in my favor—and even while granting the left–wing case this many assumptions, including that every single one of those 1.3 daily police shootings (which the Killed By Police dataset actually places at 0.4) was unjustified, with not one of them ever justified by self–defense at all—the numbers still result in the conclusion that “More than twice as many black murderers are choosing white victims as the number of white murderers choosing black victims and the number of police shooting black suspects (justified or not) combined.”

In truth, the shorthand inaccuracies in my argument actually understate the strength of its conclusion—the reality of the situation will be even more strikingly skewed in this direction than this.

In an August 25, 2013 post titled Nazi’s Can’t Do Math: Reflections on Racism, Crime and the Illiteracy of Right-Wing Statistical Analysis, Tim Wise attempts to counter claims of the sort which I’ve substantiated in the last entry in this series, and in the process demonstrates some innumeracy (which is the proper term for an inability to read statistics, not illiteracy—although it may be a form of illiteracy to fail to understand the difference between the meanings of the words illiteracy and innumeracy) of his own.

First, he rightly notes that the data “suggest that only a ridiculously small percentage of African Americans will kill anyone in a given year.” I’ll quote the whole paragraph, because at least on this point he’s correct, and this point is important (even though Wise would prove himself to be an inconsistent hypocrite were someone else to emphasize the same point with regards to rates of police shootings of minorities): “In 2010, since there were 42 million African Americans in the population, for there to have been 8,384 black murderers (and even if we assumed that each of these were separate and unique persons — i.e., there were no repeat offenders, which is unlikely), this would mean that at most, about 2 one–hundreths of one percent of all blacks committed homicide that year. So to fear black people generally, given numbers like these, is truly absurd.” Of course, as we will see, the rate of police shootings of minorities is even smaller than this—and if you’re familiar at all with Tim Wise, you know that there’s no chance in Hell he would apply the same reasoning towards the question of whether it’s absurd or not for minorities to fear police. So however he may apply the point hypocritically, at least right here, he’s correct.

However, he goes on to try to address the relative rates of interracial violence—and here’s where it gets truly absurd. He observes that “one could argue … that these figures clearly indicate that blacks are much more homicidal than whites. So, while the per capita homicide offending rate for blacks may be only 0.02 percent, the rate for whites is much smaller: only about 0.003 percent, or 3 one–thousandths of one percent (5,953 white murderers as a percentage of 196.8 million whites). This means that the homicide offending rate for blacks is about 6.8 times higher than the rate for whites.” He’s exactly right—that figure is clearly correct.

His counter–argument for why that’s supposedly invalid, however, is a great example of why we invented the phrase “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. He writes: “704 whites killed by blacks, as a percentage of the white population in 2010 (196.8 million) was a whopping 0.00036% of all whites who were killed by a black person that year. This comes out to about 1 white person out of every 277,000 who were killed by a black person in 2010. … 413 blacks killed by whites, as a percentage of the black population in 2010 (42 million) was 0.001% of all blacks who were killed by a white person that year. This equates to about 1 black person out of every 100,000 who were killed by a white person in 2010. In other words, although interracial homicides are incredibly rare in either direction, any given black person in the United States is about 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a white person than any given white person is to be murdered by a black person.”

This sounds like a shocking number. Blacks are more likely to be murdered by whites than vice versa!

But how could that possibly be so, when we have already established that: (1) blacks commit a greater proportion of the total violent crime in the United States (about 50% of it); and (2) they choose white victims approximately 50% of the time for most crimes, whereas white criminals choose black victims only about 4% of the time? The most obvious answer is that this statistic doesn’t reflect who is killing whom how often at all; all that it actually reflects is that the black population is smaller, so killing one white individual kills a smaller percentage of the total white population than killing one black individual kills of the total black population. As I’ll show, you’ll expect this number to be larger for blacks even if blacks both kill more in general and very frequently target whites as victims intentionally. And it will turn out that once we plug in the actual numbers, the number we would expect to show up in this formula if there is no deliberate selection of white victims is much larger than the one Wise actually finds when he plugs in these numbers from the real world. To understand that, you’ll have to compare what Wise finds with the real numbers to what we would expect to find in a hypothetical scenario where crime rates are equal across racial groups.

So to put this number back in consonance with the rest of the figures we’ve looked at now, we’ll have to pull our calculators back out again. John Derbyshire explains exactly what is wrong with Tim Wise’s supposedly shocking number—I’ll be plugging my own numbers and words into his explanation to present it in a way I consider much clearer. So, let’s suppose a population of 150,000 people (N) has 125,000 whites and 25,000 blacks (B). Suppose both blacks and whites kill at a rate of 1 per 1000 (M).

The total number of black murders of white victims will then be the black potential–killer population divided by 1000, multiplied by the white potential–victim percentage of the population, which is (25,000/1000) × (125,000/150,000). This comes out to 25 × 0.833…, resulting in the final number of black–on–white murders: 20.833. Likewise, the total number of white murders of black victims will be the white potential–killer population divided by 1000, multiplied by the black potential–victim percentage of the population, which is (125,000/1000) × (25,000/150,000). This comes out to 125 × 0.166…, resulting in a final number of white–on–black murders: 20.833. Can you see what just happened? The number in both cases is the same. That’s because both (W/M) × (B/N) and (B/M) × (W/N) are the same thing as (B×W) / (M×N).

But because this same number of murders are committed by very different relative proportions of the population, the relative risks of being victimized by white or black killers are not equivalent. On the assumption of equal murder rates, one in 1200 (from 25,000 ÷ 20.833) blacks will be murdered by whites, whereas one in 6000 (from 125,000 ÷ 20.833) whites will be murdered by blacks. One in 1200 blacks being murdered by whites can be expressed as five in 6000 blacks being murdered by whites, so look what that means: if one in 6000 whites will be murdered by blacks, while five in 6000 blacks will be murdered by whites, that means that on perfectly neutral assumptions, any given black person should be expected to be fivetimes more likely to be killed by a white murderer than any given white person is to be killed by a black murder. The fact that Tim Wise finds that, in reality, the actual statistic is “less than three times more likely” sounds meaningful if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be comparing it to in order to make sense of it. But the number he finds is actually less than the assumption that people are equally likely to murder any given individual they encounter would lead us to expect. That point doesn’t work in his favor; it works against it.

There is a very basic underlying concept that is being glossed over here.

Let’s take a given black person named Jamal. One question we could ask is whether Jamal is more likely to be die by being killed by a white murderer or a black one. A different question is what the risk is that Jamal is going to be killed by any given, particular black or white individual he encounters. Wise makes the absolutely elementary mistake of focusing on the first question while misleading us into thinking the answers holds any relevance for the second one.

I’m now going to use a terrible, no good, very bad analogy to illustrate my point—understand that I’m exaggerating here for effect to make the point as vivid as possible (and for God’s sake, I’m not saying encountering an African–American is exactly like encountering a bear). The risk that your life is going to end in a car accident is much higher than the risk that you’re going to be mauled to death by a bear, in the specific sense that far more people die annually in the United States in car accidents than they do in bear attacks. And yet, that simply has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether any given encounter with a bear is more or less likely to kill you than any given ride in an automobile—if you’re being approached by a bear and you have the option of driving away in a vehicle, the fact that more people die annually in car accidents in no way, shape, or form makes it more rational for you to choose to sit next to the bear instead of driving away. Again, black people aren’t as dangerous as bears and most certainly all white people aren’t as safe as a car ride, but that’s still the essence of exactly the fallacy Wise is committing—he’s telling us that car rides are more dangerous than bears because more people die in them annually, and acting as if that overrides the fact that a lot more encounters with bears kill people than car rides do (compared to the number of times each happens).

The other argument Wise makes is even more clearly absurd. He argues that it’s “precisely because the black homicide offending rate is so much higher than the rate for whites (as noted above, 6.8 times higher) [that] we should expect the black–on–white homicide numbers to be much higher than they were, relative to the white–on–black numbers.”

As we saw in the last entry, we actually can in fact control for that—and we have, and a significant degree of very probably racial targeting of white victims by black criminals still remains. But even still, if a given white person is asking whether a given black or white individual he encounters next is more likely to kill him, it doesn’t matter how many black people that black individual likely kills. That’s like saying I shouldn’t drive away from the bear because, hey, he kills a lot more fish and maybe even other bears than he does people, after all, so he’s not relatively that dangerous to me—no; how many fish he kills just doesn’t bear any relevance whatsoever to how likely he is to kill me. The second problem should be fairly obvious in light of the rest of the discussion held here: murder is the one crime for which a wide majority of perpetration is within–race. Black murderers kill white victims only about 15% of the time, but black rapists choose white victims around 50% of the time. If we’re wondering whether black criminals intentionally target white victims, murder is the one crime we have the least possible reason to ask that about—so it isn’t actually a test of the hypothesis at hand at all. I’ve presented more serious reasoning in part 3 to show that a significant amount of deliberate targeting of white victims in black crime is extremely probable—and the numbers suggest that this is so for rape several times more than it is even for robbery.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Amongst the cases reported by the Council of Conservative Citizens—which, for the most part, merely links to reports elsewhere, as you can see in the following link—is this case in 2014 in which three black men raped a white woman in public after a rap concert in Indiana. “A witness and relative of the victim reported that she came out of the hotel and observed four black males around the victim’s vehicle and a crowd of people, further from the vehicle, laughing and observing the incident. She could hear the victim in the car screaming and telling her assailants “no.” The witness stated she attempted to help, but another male placed a gun to her ribs and told her to “shut up and watch”.”

Is the CCC responsible for Dylann Roof’s actions because they reported this incident? Which is the bigger problem here: an act of gang rape, or the fact that the CCC reported it?

Despite the fact that the rate of black–on–white rape outstrips the reverse so significantly, white concern about black–on–white rape is considered intrinsically racist even though black concern about white–on–black rape is condoned to the point that even after then 15–year–old Tawana Brawley’s claims of having been raped by a gang of white men were determined conclusively to have been a hoax she invented by scribbling the words “nigger” and “KKK” onto her own legs in order to avoid punishment by her parents for staying away from home for too many days, figures like Al Sharpton and disbarred black attorney Alton Maddox (who, amongst other things, filed a demonstrably false complaint of racial bias when two white lawyers were chosen to represent a particular defendant over himself—in fact, it turned out that they had applied for the role and Maddox had not) “still believe her” and can continue to hold forth this case as evidence of how the deck is stacked on rape for whites and against black Americans. Black upset about a blatant hoax is acceptable; white upset aboutreality is ‘racist’.

And so the Council of Conservative Citizens is now considered to deserve blame for Roof’s actions simply because they reported the facts that he seized upon and became angry about. Another role reversal is in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy: in late 2014, during the protests surrounding events that had recently taken place in Ferguson, 28–year–old Ismaaiyl Brinsley took to Twitter to declare: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours….. Let’s Take 2 Of Theirs … #RIPMikeBrown … ” before shooting two arbitrarily chosen NYPD officers he had located through the traffic app Waze through their car window, execution–style. If the CoCC is responsible for Roof’s actions merely because they reported the facts which angered him, are the liberals who organized and participated in the Ferguson protests considered responsible for Ismaaiyl Brinsley?

Apparently not.

Apparently not even when the claims those protesters’ anger was centered around were finally confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice itself to have been outright, blatant lies and it turned out to be the case that Officer Darren Wilson had in fact been defending himself from a Michael Brown who first robbed a convenience store, then jaywalked in the middle of the highway, then assaulted Wilson through his car window and attempted to take his gun when Wilson pulled up to simply ask Brown to move to the sidewalk, and finally turned and charged at Wilson after Wilson pursued to arrest a subject who was now guilty of assault and most likely even attempted murder. Once again, black outrage is condoned even when directed towards blatant hoaxes; whites who are concerned about the possibility that black criminals target white victims for acts such as rape are in the words of Tim Wise “Nazis” who should “starve themselves” and die.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Statistics on rape like these expose curious tensions within “intersectionalist” feminism—the viewpoint, roughly, that racial and gender–based oppressions overlap to make black women the most unidimensionally oppressed members of American society and white men the most unidimensionally “privileged.”

In general, the tendency of “intersectionalist” viewpoints is to excuse minority crime as a byproduct of “oppression.” In late 2014, a Georgetown University senior was mugged at gunpoint, and in response he wrote an opinion piece for the University’s newspaper title “I Was Mugged, and I Understand Why.” In it, he wrote: “When I walk around at 2 a.m., nobody looks at me suspiciously, and police don’t ask me any questions. I wonder if our attackers could say the same. Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege … [and] condemn these young men … ?”

According to Paul Sperry at the New York Post, in Portland, “after a black high–school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack, according to the Willamette (Oregon) Week.” But it can go without saying that this kind of rationalization would not be used to excuse an assault or mugging performed by some low–life redneck piece of white trash—no matter how poor.

If a white boy from a trailer park assaulted his female teacher, smashing his fist into her face until he sent her to the emergency room, the message would still be all about male entitlement and misogyny—nevermind if that boy is effectively just as “structurally” disadvantaged as the black boy in almost every relevant way. Liberals wouldn’t do it, because he’s white and therefore not “structurally” oppressed no matter what the personal conditions of his life were actually like—conservatives wouldn’t do it, because conservatives generally don’t buy those kinds of excuses.

When we’re talking about men qua men committing crime, suddenly all the rules that just applied to minority crime change.

In most cases, when a given demographic disproportionately commits a certain crime, this is really a mere symptom of some underlying disease which society, and not the perpetrator, is responsible for; disproportionate crime rates are not something we should treat as a problem that the criminal group is responsible for, but an indication that society is failing the group in question in some significant way, allowing crime to fester by consequence. At least, this is the rule for minorities. But now, when men rape it is male culture that is the problem—even though this is exactly what no one is allowed to even consider possible about black violence.

Rape happens because “Cis male entitlement is embedded in everything in society … pop culture, media … Even while taking public transportation, you’ll always run into men spreading their legs and taking up much more room than they need.”

But when rap contains lines like “I’ll cut your face off, and wear it while I’m fucking your mother” (Black Vikings, Immortal Technique), the liberal response is that suggesting that this kind of content might play any sort of role in the black culture of violence is something only the most ignorant troglodyte could possibly consider. This writer tells us: “[Rap is simply] artistic expression … Yes, rap can be violent and angry, but that’s the nature of art.” Perhaps you think he’s right. Fine—but how the hell can anyone think he’s right and think that the feminists are right about rape being the result of nothing other than men being given ‘cultural messages of entitlement’ which need to end at the same time?! You can’t. (Actually, Immortal Technique is so popular amongst leftists that Jill Stein even talked about asking him to ber her running mate during the 2016 Green Party Presidential run: “I love Immortal Technique. He has great ideas—we need to hear from more people like him.”

Because black perpetrators commit disproportionate amounts of rape just as they do for all other crimes, these two tendencies within anti–racist, and feminist, worldviews speed towards head–on collision. Black culture has nothing to do with black rates of violence—and it’s offensive and disgusting to even consider the possibility. Yet, male culture has everything to do with male rates of rape—and it’s offensive and disgusting to even consider otherwise. But black males commit disproportionate amounts of rape. How can all three of these statements simultaneously be true? When men commit rape, it doesn’t happen (by my lights or by the lights of the feminist) because men are disadvantaged, or powerless, or deprived of and desperate for acceptance or affection and—like the black robbers that Oliver Friedfeld “understood”—after enough pain and humiliation they decide to obtain by violent force the basic human needs that weren’t given fairly to them.

Yet, when non–whites commit disproportionate amounts of violent or property crimes, the reasons just rejected in the case of rape are, by the lights of the feminist, exactly the reasons why they do so. But this way of looking at things does a terrible job of explaining why black criminals commit acts of rape just as disproportionately as they commit acts of robbery—and it does a terrible job of explaining why they choose white victims for those acts of rape more often than they choose white victims for acts of robbery—especially if we include the massive number of racially motivated black–on–white prison rapes in that analysis. How can male “culture” explain male rape even while black “culture” does not explain black rape, while poverty and oppression “explain” black robbery but not black rape? Even the most adamant liberal isn’t going to want to say that poverty causes people to rape, and thereby absolves them of moral responsibility for committing it; that it’s society’s fault, and not the rapist’s. They may consider saying that for robbery—but certainly not for rape. In fact, this is exactly what they call “victim blaming” in any other circumstance. But if “black culture” explains rape, why could it not explain other crimes? And if only “male culture” but not “black culture” explains rape, why do black males commit such greater amounts of rape? This haphazardness should make it abundantly clear that the explanations that are officially designated as the requried responses to these questions are motivated by the raw self–interest of identity politics, and not any consistent desire for truth.

This isn’t half as much of a reach as it might sound to you. In 2014, a high school football team in Sayreville, New Jersey was caught in a process of hazing that looked a lot more like sexual assault: “It would start with a howling noise from a senior football player at Sayreville War Memorial High School, and then the locker room lights were abruptly shut off … In the darkness, a freshman football player would be pinned to the locker–room floor, his arms and feet held down by multiple upperclassmen. Then, the victim would be lifted to his feet while a finger was forced into his rectum. Sometimes, the same finger was then shoved into the freshman player’s mouth.” Writing at the far–left outlet CounterPunch, Judith Levine says: “If it’s true that all seven of the football players arrested for hazing in the Sayreville, New Jersey, War Memorial High School locker room are students of color, that is one more reason not to prosecute them as sexual felons. I don’t mean not to prosecute them in adult court. I mean not to prosecute them at all. … Sex offenders are harassed … do we need to lock up more black and brown kids?”

Or consider the response of Amanda Kijera, the liberal activist who wrote of her rape in Haiti: “Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.

… I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night. … Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle [!] for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience. … Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but … women are not the source of their oppression; … the as–yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage [is].”

So it’s hardly a stretch to imagine fault lines forming between feminists who think anti–racists aren’t being feminist enough when they fail to “profile” black men as rapists and patronizingly treat them as if they just need to be “taught” that rape is wrong, and anti–racists who think feminists aren’t being anti–racist enough when they fail to excuse black men for violent crimes when and only when those violent acts happen to be directed against women.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

It’s worth making a comparison of the relative rates of police brutality and black–on–white violence in the United States to try to put things in perspective. According to the FBI, there were an average of 14,545 murders per year across the years of 2011–2013. which comes out to an average just shy of 40 murders per day. Since African–Americans commit approximately half of those, and pick white victims about 1/5th of the time, that means there are about four black–on–white murders every day in the United States. White perpetrators commit the other half of murders in the United States, but only choose black victims about 2.4% of the time—which means there is slightly less than one white–on–black murder in the United States every two days.

According to data that does not take statistics reported by police departments for granted, but in fact calls them into question, based on data from the early months of 2015, police kill approximately 2.6 subjects per day—approximately half of which are black, which brings the number down to 1.3 police shootings of black suspects per day.

Of this number, it is unclear how many are justified or unjustified.

According to the FBI, in 2013 police were attacked by someone carrying a weapon roughly 10,000 times—2,200 of those times with a firearm. If police kill 2.6 suspects per day every day for a year, that’s still less than 1000 total killings at the end of the year. Some liberal readers may point to gaps in the data (call it the “racism of the gaps” strategy) and insist on disagreeing, but if police are killing suspects far less frequently than they’re being attacked by them, it seems safe to me to bet that the vast majority of those killings are probably justified.

However, even if we assume that every single one of them was unjustified, combining the number of police shootings of black suspects per day (1.3) with the number of white murders of black victims per day (0.48) would still give us a smaller number (~1.8) than the number of black murders of white victims every day in the United States (~4). More than twice as many black murderers are choosing white victims as the number of white murderers choosing black victims and the number of police shooting black suspects (justified or not) combined.(Meanwhile, there are 16 black murders of black victims every single day across the United States—more thaneight times the number of white civilian murders and justified or unjustified police shootings of black victims combined.)

However, both of these statistics really still need to be taken account of in terms of the wider context that murder only accounts for 0.6% of the deaths in the United States in general. While there are approximately 40 murders, 4 of which are black–on–white, on a typical day in the United States, on the same day 90 Americans will die in car crashes, 110 will commit suicide, 120 will overdose on drugs, 256 will die in accidental falls or other accidents, 1580 will die of cancer and more than 1600 will die of heart attacks. If Roof is concerned about “saving the white race,” then Burger King, cigarettes, drunk driving, wobbly ladders and clinical depression are far more formidable foes than black criminals. But what goes for Roof’s underlying logic goes for “#blacklivesmatter,” too. Tim Wise is right that it’s only a tiny fraction of the black population who commits an act of violence in any given year—the only problem with that is the hypocritical inconsistency we can well know to expect should anyone say the same about racist attacks against black Americans, whether committed by civilians or police, which even combined are still yet only half the size of the fraction of black citizens committing acts of violence Wise himself has just called “tiny.” Whatever goes for the relative insignificance of disproportionate black–on–white violence goes at least twice as much for both white–on–black and police–on–black violence combined.

And it goes even more so for hysteria about mass shootings, which make up only 0.2% of that 0.6% of deaths in America. Furthermore, whites are not disproportionately likely to be the perpetrators; in fact, as with most other crimes, the case is once again in the opposite direction: non–whites are somewhat more likely to perpetrate mass shootings, relative to the population rate. Of the last 22 attacks (from early June of 2009 to the Charleston attack), 10 were perpetrated by non–whites—45% of the total, which surpasses non–whites’ 37% representation of the population across this period of time. If we go back all the way to 1982, the non–white representation of the population from 1982–present is about 28.5%—yet the non–white representation amongst serial killers is 25 out of 70, or 35.7%. The black rate, in particular, is 11 out of 70, or 15.7% (whereas the population as a whole has been roughly 12.2% black across the same period of time).

In that same chart—compiled by the left–wing Mother Jones—you can also see a compilation of statements about the perpetrators’ mental health. And it is obvious that there is a higher incidence of mental illness here than across the general population: Wiliam Cruse in 1987 “suffered from paranoid delusions. A judge found that he suffered from ‘extreme mental illness.’” Colin Ferguson in 1993 “suffered from racial paranoia and was obsessed with nonexistent conspiracies. His landlord said he had ‘delusions of grandeur.’” Nathan Gale in 2004 “was discharged from the military because he was a paranoid schizophrenic.” Jennifer Sanmarco in 2006 “was placed on retirement disability for psychological reasons. Fellow employees described her behavior as increasingly bizarre. She believed the Postal Service employees were conspiring against her.” Maurice Clemmons in 2009 “had a history of erratic, bizarre behavior. He once asked his family to get naked for 5 minutes on Sunday; he said he thought the world would end and that he was Jesus.” Eduardo Sencion in 2011 “was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager and feared demons were out to get him.”

The association between mental illness and mass shootings isn’t a “lie”—nevermind one we only entertain for white suspects. The hypocrites who make this accusation suddenly decide that concern about mental illness is a disingenuous way to disregard a perpetrator’s words, whenever we actually do that, and then they turn around and tell us that it’s a disingenuous way to humanize and try to provoke empathy for evil white men when we do it for cases involving them. When writers like those at Jezebel speculate about “Why Most Serial Killers Are Privileged White Men”, the actual answer to that is that they aren’t—and they never have been. A better question would be to ask exactly what bias Jezebel is demonstrating when it incorrectlythinks they are and misinforms its readers into believing the same falsehood.

In any case, when Roof says “You’re raping our women”, I could perhaps consider supporting his actions had he actually been in a room full of rapists (regardless of their race)—say, had he burst onto a scene of ‘To Catch a Predator’ before opening fire. But his response was racism of the most crudely idiotic form: it is extremely unlikely that any of the three men he killed (nevermind the six women) were actually rapists, just as none of the 3000 people who died in the World Trade Center had any kind of direct responsibility for U.S. military policy. As with bin Laden, the only thing Roof “achieved” is to help to lend support to the impression that anyone who doesn’t rush to demand that all media reporting any of the facts that were involved in his transformation be shut down is inherently dangerous because they are deaf to that same distinction (even though such suspicion never spills over, in the same way, to the actions of people like Christopher Dorner, even when he has thousands of openly enthusiastic admirers).

One of the many reasons why Roof’s actions were vile and idiotic is exactly the same reason why we should all agree that if anti–American terrorism is motivated by grievances towards the brutality of U.S. military policy, it is an idiotic response to those concerns: Osama bin Laden’s actions didn’t led to Noam Chomsky being elected head of the Department of Defense or to a worldwide withdrawal of American military bases from all foreign soil; they led to the mindless reflexive jingoism of the War on Terror and an even more dramatic backlash against Islam itself, and to anyone who saw anything plausible in the suggestions of people like Chomsky at all being immediately labeled “anti–American.” There’s no more reason to demand that everyone who opposes that think every single thing Roof’s mind latched onto was illegitimate in order to oppose that than there is to demand that anyone who opposes Floyd Corkins’ attempted mass shooting repudiate the concept of gay marriage, or anyone who opposes Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s cop executions to repudiate #BlackLivesMatter. A very small subset of the American population will commit acts of violence in the name of apparently almost any ideology. And no, it’s far from clear that these people are always sane—regardless what particular ideology they might’ve happened to have latched on to.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Only now can I finally arrive at the point I set out to make in the very beginning of this series.

After the introduction, the rest of Dylann Roof’s manifesto is racism of the most obviously, blatantly crude form. “Many veterans believe we owe them something for “protecting our way of life” or “protecting our freedom”. But im not sure what way of life they are talking about. How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews.” But what shifted Roof towards this perspective?

As M.G. at Those Who Can See points out, ideology might be a red herring—any time ideology seems to be what motivated someone, there almost always turns out to be something much more personal involved. Lee Boyd Malvo gave a jailhouse interview in which he explained how “Muhammad snapped when he lost custody of his children and wanted to get back at his ex–wife.” His ex–wife, Mildred Muhammad, wrote a book titled ‘Scared Silent’ in which she explained how John Allan Muhammad ”began plotting against her after she won custody of their young son and two daughters in 2001. … [She] says her ex-husband thought if she were killed by a crazed gunman, he would regain custody of their children and collect compensation owed them as crime victims. “His end–game scenario was to come in as the grieving father,” she says.”

Similarly, Colin Ferguson’s life “was littered with dysfunction and disappointment. Son of a wealthy Jamaican family, he lost both his parents at age 20 and migrated to the U.S. where menial jobs and his marriage’s failure in 1988 sent him into a tailspin. After a work injury, he took time off to attend junior college, where his outbursts troubled peers….”

Likewise, it turns out that Dylann Roof might have gone over the edge when a black man won his girl—Scott Roof, Dylann’s cousin, told The Intercept that “He kind of went over the edge when a girl he liked starting dating a black guy two years back.”

This may or may not render my suggestion irrelevant—it may have been that, after Roof lost the girl he wanted, impotent and resentful rage would have found some form to explode in no matter what. But if it does render my suggestion irrelevant, then it renders all the leftist analysis irrelevant too, because it was this personal incident and not any true ideological cause which turned Roof into what he ultimately became.

On the other hand, the manner in which the George Zimmerman trial was distorted by the media to fit a predetermined racial lens wasabsolutely egregious. And it isstriking that across 2008–2012, black criminals perpetrated 40% of crimes but were portrayed in the media as perpetrators only 20% of the time—that substantially more black–on–white than white–on–black crime was taking place across this period of time—including black–on–white rape—and none of these incidents got half as much coverage as the faulty narrative of the Zimmerman case did.

Yet, that faulty narrative did inspire many black–on–white revenge attacks, including a case of a man in Alabama put in critical care after being attacked with baseball bats by a group of assailants, one of whom was heard by a witness yelling: “Now that’s justice for Trayvon;” a case where a 50 year old white man who stopped at a store in Midtown, a 94% black neighborhood on the east side of Sanford, was dragged from his car and beaten with hammers while Al Sharpton spoke on the Trayvon Martin case nearby (the author of the original Orlando Sentinel articles admitted to censoring the race of the victim on purpose, yet direct ties were found between one perpetrator and the Yahweh Bin Yahweh black power cult); a caseof a group of up to thirty “teenagers” who assaulted five people returning to their cars after a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, in which one of the perpetrators was found bragging about the attack as revenge for Trayvon on Twitter; a case of a group in Gainesville, Florida who assaulted a man who stopped a purse thief while shouting “Trayvon”; a case of two teenagers in Chicago who were charged with hate crimes after directly telling police that their attack on a random white man was revenge for Trayvon … and several more.

How many white–on–black “revenge for O. J. Simpson” violent assaults do you think there were in 1995? I searched Google for “white on black assault revenge for O. J. Simpson” and got exactly four results—the top result was from “American Conservatives of Color” where the search picked up the phrase, “the real fact of the matter is thatwhite-on-black assault/murder is NOT an epidemic in this nation.” Interesting.

In any case, even if this doesn’t hold true for Dylann Roof, it’s true in general: what slanted media coverage of this sort does, when it ignores facts like these, is play straight into the hands of the vile sort of racism that motivated Dylann Roof. What happens is this: if you don’t talk about these facts openly, someone will. And people who want to know about those facts will then listen to those people. If decent people don’t talk about it, then people who have an agenda to seize on will be the ones who get it. And then you give those sources a fact to lead out with that is verifiable for everyone to see. You increase their plausibility. You give people valid reasons to listen to them that they otherwise would not have had. And people learn that those sources are telling them the truth about facts that you won’t. And that arms them with extra opportunities to persuade people of their agenda.

And if your response to this is to condemn all talk about those facts because only people who have agendas talk about them, you only more deeply entrench that problem even further. So, when I say that Dylann Roof was right when he said that “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case.… It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google …There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. … How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?” I am no more making a defense of his actions than it is a defense of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks to observe that Osama Bin Laden was correct when he said that the United States supplies a substantial amount of economic and military aid to Israel. My point is to damn the media’s coverage of these events, because you played into Roof’s perceptions by being so illegitimate in your coverage of these incidents that you legitimized the racist sources that people like Roof turned to in consequence. And it should scare you that you handed the truth over to a mass murderer by dropping it out of your own hands by handling it so pathetically ineptly.

If there is an ideological lesson to draw from this attack, it is that. If the mass media handles race–related issues this pathetically, it will thereby legitimize alternative sources. And you might not like the agenda that those alternative sources latch on to the facts you ignore or distort to try to advance—but the fact that people pushing those agendas will now be leading with what is demonstrably the truth will legitimize them in the eyes of previously impartial listeners and discredit you.

And if you don’t want to create that dynamic, and you want people to respect you therefore listen to you instead and therefore give sources with those kinds of agendas fewer opportunities to push them, then you’ll have to do a hell of a better job than that at covering the basic facts. When the only lesson the media can draw from this—this, an incident whose original spark was createdby the media’s own absolute ineptitude and failure in covering the George Zimmerman case, taking skewed information directly from the defense and its propaganda team without the slightest caution or qualification or mention to readers that these were the original source—is that white peoples’ everyday beliefs are what caused Dylann Roof’s actions, in articles with titles like “White America Is Complicit” or essays that tell white people to “take responsibility” for the fact that Dylann Roof is “white like [them]”, they only further alienate everyone who can plainly see that that is all bullshit. And in doing so, they continue increasing the likelihood that the growing numbers of ordinary everyday white people who at the very least hold no conscious hatred for anyone, and who are continually, increasingly alienated by all this, will be prone to listen to alternative sources who speak to what is, to everyone who doesn’t see the world through those particular blinders, the plain and obvious truth—and then, once they have hooked the listeners you’ve alienated and abandoned with the bits of truth you’ve thrown away and allowed them to scavenge—may go on to push and develop an agenda you probably won’t like very much at all.

Mainstream and left–leaning media, if you don’t want that to happen, you need to clean your act the hell up. Simply calling the sources that pick up on the facts you’ve failed to properly address “racist” just makes you look even more like this than you already did:

The other racially charged comment made by Dylann Roof which has received scrutiny, just before opening fire: “You rape our women….” This comment led Jamelle Bouie at Slate to conclude that “[While] it’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth … is that his fear … of black sexuality … belongs to America as much as it does the South.”

This is where the typical modus operandi of the left is often, in the words of John Tooby (speaking to Slate editor Judith Shulevitz about “Gould, Lewontin, and a few others” in 2000), to “attempt to drag the ideas they opposed under by manufacturing links to various repugnant doctrines.” If I were playing that game, I would say the following:

‘Bouie’s suggestion that some intrinsic “fear … of black sexuality” lies at the root of less than positive attitudes towards black individuals echoes the disgusting black supremacist armchair psychoanalysis of “academics” like Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, who defends the so–called “melanin theory” which says that white people are the genetically defective descendants of albino mutants of the original African race, and posits that “white supremacy” thus results from white peoples’ attempts to overcompensate for subconsciously acknowledged genetic and sexual inferiority.’

‘Amongst many other things, Welsing has written the following: “On both St. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, the white male gives gifts of chocolate candy with nuts…. If his sweetheart ingests ‘chocolate with nuts’, the white male can fantasize that he is genetically equal to the Black male…. Is it not also curious that when white males are young and vigorous, they attempt to master the large brown balls, but as they become older and wiser, they psychologically resign themselves to their inability to master the large brown balls? Their focus then shifts masochistically to hitting the tiny white golf balls in disgust and resignation — in full final realization of white genetic recessiveness. … I have said all of the above to state that, yes, there is envy in the white supremacy culture, but it began with the white male’s envy of the genetic power residing in the Black male’s testicles and phallus. Perhaps there was also envy of the comparatively longer length of the Black phallus.”’

“Fear” of Black sexuality, Bouie? Curiously, there exists in the United States today no “fear” of Asian male sexuality. In fact, the predominant Asian male stereotype is emasculate and asexual—an article at Adios Barbie titled “Every Day Racism and You” takes women to task for their convictions in this stereotype. It opens with the story of a Korean woman’s response to the author asking her why she had never dated a Korean man: “Because I’d feel like I was dating my brother.” The author then explains that she “was led to look deeply into [her] white privilege and challenge [her] own bias as [she] realized [she] didn’t find Asian men attractive.” And she confesses that “this acknowledgment was mortifying….”

What explanation would Bouie give us for this discrepancy, if he wouldn’t endorse an answer like Welsing’s? Is it really just a coincidence that the white supremacists attempting to brainwash us all through deliberately inaccurate stereotypes in the mainstream media chose to take exactly the opposite strategy towards Asian males that they take towards Black males? Why this inconsistency? Are we really supposed to believe that white supremacists mind–controlling our culture just arbitrarily chose one strategy for no damn reason at all in the first case, and then arbitrarily chose precisely the opposite strategy for no damn reason at all in the second case? [1] The only alternative option is that this pattern is explained by differences in the patterns of black and Asian male behavior.

Is there evidence that concerns about black–on–white rape are justified in any sense, or is there evidence that these concerns simply result from some sort of Freudian “fear … of black sexuality?” Let’s try something Bouie doesn’t appear to have done: actually ask what the data says. Under Jamelle Bouie’s scrutiny, black–on–white rape is just something “racists [use] … to defend their worst racist violence.” What Bouie has less interest in asking is how often black–on–white rape itself might, in fact, be a horrible act of racist violence. So, what does the data say?

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

As I explained in a previous post, we actually have very good evidence that police arrest rates are not racially biased: the Bureau of Justice Statistics keeps information on the reports of victims and witnesses in a data collection known as the National Crime Victimization Survey. And when victims and witnesses report the race of their assailants, not only do they provide us with racial percentages that dovetail closely with those found in arrest rates, but when and where the racial breakdown in victim and witness reports differ from those found in arrest rates, victims and witnesses actually identify a higher black percentage of criminals than we find amongst police arrests, strongly suggesting that if anything, police actually arrest black criminals less frequently than their rate of commission of crimes would justify.

We can use the NCVS data to analyze interracial violence, as well.

First, before digging into all the interpretive issues and asking what it means, let’s perform the most basic calculation: what are the basic rates of black–on–white and white–on–black violence?

To listen to the mainstream media tell the story, we might expect that white–on–minority violence would be one of the most prominent categories. But in fact, we find nothing of the sort.

In 2010, the white and black populations in the United States were 196,817,552 and 37,685,848, respectively. According to the NCVS’ victim and witness reports, an estimated 320,082 whites were victims of violence from blacks, whereas approximately 62,593 blacks were victims of violence from whites.

From this, we can derive a few different baseline numbers to start our analysis out with.

Dividing the white population by the number of white on black attacks, whites committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 32 per 100,000, whereas blacks committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 849 per 100,000. Dividing the black rate of interacial violence by the white rate (849/32), this means that the “average” black individual in 2010 was 26.5 times more likely to attack a white victim than vice versa.

We also find it confirmed in this data that blacks, though only 12% of the population, are responsible for around 50% of all the violent crimes committed annually in the United States. Yet, not only are black perpetrators committing more violent crime to begin with, they also choose white victims for those crimes at drastically higher rates: black perpetrators of violent crimes chose white victims 47.7% of the time, whereas white perpetrators chose black victims a mere 3.9% of the time.

For rape, in particular? Of the 13,463 reported rapes committed by black perpetrators in 2010, 50.2% of these were committed against white victims—and “by contrast, the number of white–on–black rapes … reported in the NCVS surveys were so infinitesimal, that in each case whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all rapes … committed against black victims in the United States.” (Source) Of course, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that there was not a single white–on–black rape in 2010; and it isn’t supposed to. But it does imply that the numbers are extremely low—lower than 0.01%, and most certainly drastically lower than the black–on–white rate of rape.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Now to approach a further interesting question: do we find evidence in this data that black criminals are intentionally targeting white victims? Obviously, intentional targeting isn’t the sole factor influence the relative rates of interracial violence. The population rate and therefore encounter rate (that is, the likelihood that any given white individual will encounter a potential black victim, and vice versa) is one thing we have to account for. The other thing we have to account for is the crime rate itself. One possibility is that when these are added together, they will account for the raw disparity between BOW and WOB crime completely, and the greater likelihood of black–on–white violence over white–on–black violence will disappear. The other possibility is that these factors will not eliminate the disparity—which will suggest that black criminals are in fact deliberately choosing a disproportionate number of white victims.

To see how the population rate would impact this calculation, consider a society of 100,000 people containing 85,000 whites and 15,000 blacks. In this hypothetical society, everyone commits exactly one crime with a perfectly randomized victim, so both races commit crimes at exactly identical rates without any concern for race. Whites would therefore commit 85,000 crimes, of which the victims would be 85% white and 15% black, resulting in 72,250 white–on–white crimes and 12,750 white–on–black crimes; whereas blacks would commit 15,000 crimes, of which the victims would once again be 85% white and 15% black, resulting in 12,750 black–on–black crimes and 2,250 black–on–white crimes.

So how do we control for the population rate? The most basic way is to compare the ratio of black and white members of the general population to the ratio of black victims of white violent crime to white victims of black violent crime. For our hypothetical scenario, dividing 85,000 whites by 15,000 blacks gives us the result that there are 5.6 times more whites than blacks in our population. Likewise, dividing 12,750 WOB crimes by 2,250 BOW crimes gives us the result that there are 5.6 times more WOB attacks than BOW attacks. These ratios both equal 5.6, so there is no disparity left to account for: the population rate in this hypothetical scenario fully accounts for the disparity in interracial crime that exists.

Now plugging in the real numbers: If we divide 196,817,552 by 37,685,848, there were about 5.2 times more white than black individuals within the United States population in 2010. So, nationally and on average, any given black individual is 5.2 times more likely to encounter a white individual than any given white individual is to encounter a black individual—which, at least so far, clearly is not sufficient to account for the fact that any given black individual is 26.5 times more likely to attack a white victim than vice versa.

American Rennaisance’s Color of Crime report actually commits an interesting error here. It writes, in footnote 42: “ … although blacks and whites are not perfectly integrated, and segregation varies considerably by neighborhood, the same figure [that any black person is 5.2 times more likely to encounter a white person than a white person is to encounter a black person] … applies everywhere. This is because segregation decreases blacks’ contact with whites, but it also decreases whites’ contact with blacks by exactly the same amount. Segregation, whatever its degree, therefore does not change the relative likelihood of blacks encountering whites and vice versa.”

The suggestion here is supposed to be that the relative ratio of black–encounters–white to white–encounters–black will always be 5.2, no matter what numbers are plugged in the ratio between them will always stay the same, because removing any one black individual from ‘circulation’ simply takes one black out of contact with whites, and takes the same number of whites out of contact with blacks. But the problem is that this sophomorically ignores the fact that the ratio of blacks to whites in varying areas will be different, as well—we aren’t taking a homogenous national population and then removing a single person from national circulation at a time. We aren’t shaking up a homogenous M&M’s, where we’re taking one M&M at a time out of the bag; we’re dealing with neighborhoods with varying racial compositions. So to see very clearly why what AmRen says here is false, all we have to do is consider how it would apply to a city with a black majority: in 2010, the population of Detroit contained around 588,244 black individuals, and around 123,054 white individuals. Therefore, in Detroit in 2010, a white individual on average was about 4.78 times more likely to encounter a black individual than to encounter another white individual. Obviously, black individuals will not be 5.2 times more likely to encounter white individuals than whites are to encounter blacks when blacks are the majority. And the relative percentage of blacks and whites in local populations will vary significantly across the United States—and thus so, too, will the ratio of encounters.

However, this probably doesn’t weaken the case that encounter rates fail to account for the greater likelihood that a black criminal will target a white victim than vice versa. In fact, it probably strengthens it—and probably strengthens it dramatically, making interracial crime even more disproportionately tilted towards the black–on–white direction than the AR report’s already large estimates claim. What we really want to know or at least try to estimate is what the encounter rate is amongst the particular individuals who are committing the actual crime. And if black violence is more likely to take place in highly segregated areas in which blacks make up a greater percentage of the local population than they do of the national population (as in Detroit, where blacks make up 82.7% of the population, compared to about 12% nationally), then the issue is not that the greater likelihood that a given black will encounter a white than vice versa (which averages 5.2 nationally) is insufficient to encounter for the greater likelihood that a black perpetrator will attack a white victim than vice versa (26.5)—but that the particular blacks who are committing the violent crime—a minority of the overall black population—are more likely to attack whites even though they are less likely to encounter them than vice versa, given that criminal blacks are most highly concentrated in black–majority areas.

It would be a monumentally complex task, well beyond the length of even a series like this one, to calculate and then average the encounter rate for specific black and white criminals—probably well beyond the potential of statistical data–based analysis to even pinpoint, since we can’t actually know who any particular individual actually runs into on any given day, which depends at the very least on what stores he typically visits, what time of day he typically visits them at, who his friends and friends of friends are, and so on. But the average 5.2 figure overestimates the relative likelihood of any given black person encountering a white person than vice versa significantly.

Across the United States population as a whole, the average black person in 2010 lived in a neighborhood that was 45% black. If we use this to perform a rough estimate, then the average population of 100,000 containing notable numbers of blacks would consist of 45,000 blacks and 55,000 whites. In that case, any given black individual would on average be only 1.2 times more likely to encounter a white than a white is to encounter a black, not 5.2. And if the most violent crime is likely to occur in areas which are the most segregated, that means most violent black crime is taking place in areas where the likelihood of black–encountering–white is only 1.2 times larger than the likelihood of white–encountering–black, or less (as in the case of Detroit, where the probability shifts in the opposite direction) . The gap from there to explaining a 26.5 times higher probability of black–attacking–white than white–attacking–black is therefore even larger than the Color of Crime report suggests.

All numbers past this point will therefore be an underestimation of the full extent of black–on–white violence unless stated otherwise, as I will keep my calculations highly conservative by retaining the larger figure which we know to be an overestimation of the disparity in encounter rates between blacks and whites for all the reasons given above.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

The next question we have to ask in order to identify the extent to which the deliberate choice of white victims by black perpetrators might be responsible for disparities in interracial crime is whether the higher rates of violence amongst black suspects in general could account for it.

To see how this would work, consider a population of 15,000 blacks and 85,000 whites—and assume that blacks commit murder at a rate of 200 per 1000 while whites commit murder at a rate of 50 per 1000 (in other words, blacks commit murder at a rate 4 times higher than whites do). In a given year, there would then be 3000 black acts of murder and 4250 white acts of murder. There are 5.6 times more whites than blacks in our population, so if encounters are perfectly randomized, any member of this population is 5.6 times more likely to encounter a white than a black. Assuming that everyone is equally likely to attack any given individual they encounter (let’s call this the “no racial targeting” assumption), 638 of the white murders (15% of the total) would be against black victims (and notice that the remaining 3612 white murders of white victims needed to make up our total of 4,250 white murders is a number 5.6 times larger than the 638 white murders of black victims) while 2,550 of the black murders (85% of the total) would be against white victims (and notice that 2,250 is a number 5.6 times larger than the 450 black murders of black victims).

Thus, even though there is no deliberate targeting of white victims taking place, dividing 2550 by 638, any given white would be 4 times more likely to be killed by a black murderer than vice versa,simply because murderers make up a proportionally larger percentage of the total black population, without any deliberate targeting of white victims by black murderers. So to take these numbers, how would we control for the population rate and the crime rate together to rule out racial targeting? This scenario tells us what numbers we should find if there is, in fact, “no racial targeting.” First, the raw rate of probability that a black would murder a white instead of a white murdering a black in this scenario—the number we want to apply our controls to—would be the ratio arrived at by dividing the white population (85,000) by the number of white–on–black murders (638)—and then dividing this by the ratio arrived at by dividing the black population (15,000) by the number of black–on–white murders (2,250). This gives us 133.23 divided by 5.88, or 22.66.

We can now apply controls to this number for both racial crime rates and the interracial encounter rateto test the “no racial targeting” assumption. There are 5.6 times more whites than blacks in our population, so any given criminal on any given day is 5.6 times more likely to encounter a white than a black. And there are 4 times more black than white crimes per year. Now, when we multiply 5.6 times 4, what number do we get? 22.66. Another way of putting this is that after dividing the raw interracial crime disparity by the rate of difference in racial crime rates and then the interracial encounter rate, dividing 22.66 by the first number (4) should give us 5.6, and dividing that number by the second number (5.6) should give us exactly 1.

We now understand how to test the “no racial targeting” assumption. We need only three numbers: the “raw” rate of difference between black–on–white and white–on–black crimes, the rate of difference between the black and white crime rates, and the encounter rate (how many more whites than blacks there are in a given population, or how much more likely a black is to encounter a white than a white is to encounter a black). When we divide the first number by the second two, if there is no racial targeting, then this number should equal exactly 1. But the larger this number is than 1, the greater the likelihood is that a black perpetrator will choose a white victim even once the greater number of potential white victims and the higher likelihood that a black individual will commit a violent crime to begin with is taken account of—and the more likely it is that racial targeting accounts for much of the remaining difference.

Now, when we plug in the numbers for 2001–2003, we arrive at the following chart: Figure 18 shows the “raw” probability that a white is more likely to be victimized by a black perpetrator than vice versa (the counterpart to our hypothetical scenario’s 22.66). In figure 19, the black bar titled “interracial crime multiple” adjusts this for the number of potential victims (in our above scenario, that would be dividing by 5.6). The grey bar, titled “overall black/white crime multiple”, represents the rate at which blacks are more likely to commit the crime in question than whites in general (in our above scenario, that would be dividing by 4); and the white bar, “their ratios”, adjusts the interracial crime multiple by the overall black/white crime multiple to finally arrive at the relative likelihood that a black perpetrator will choose to attack a white victim instead of a white perpetrator attacking a black victim, with all else held equal.

So what do we see when we plug in the real numbers? For aggravated assault, the result is barely over one, which suggests that blacks might deliberately target white victims for aggravated assault in only a minority of cases—almost all of the raw disparity is accounted for by the difference in racial rates of violence combined with the greater number of possible white victims. But for robbery, the ratio is 1.66. It will be easy for liberals to write robbery in particular off due to the fact that whites are more likely to own property to begin with—so while there is a deliberate targeting of white victims for acts of robbery, there isn’t necessarily any reason to think that this targeting is racially motivated, per se.

The chart reveals something quite troubling for the case that relative poverty is the best explanation for why violent blacks choose white victims more often than vice versa, however: the ratio of black criminals choosing white over black victims is much larger in the case of rape than it is in the case of other crimes—the number still left over after accounting for everything in the case of rape is 7.4. This is more than four times larger than the 1.66 number found remaining for robbery. In other words, black criminals are more than seven times more likely to choose a white victim over a black one even after controlling for the greater number of possible white victims contained in the population—and that’s by an estimate that likely overestimates the average criminal black person’s white encounter rate drastically—which means black criminals are at least four times more likely to deliberately target a white victim over a black one for an act of rape than they are to target a white victim over a black one for a robbery. Let that sink in: black perpetrators choose white victims over black ones for acts of rape more frequently than they choose white victims over black ones for acts of robbery.

The greater propensity of black perpetrators to choose white victims for acts of robbery actually turns out to be largely explained by the fact that blacks commit acts of robbery more frequently to begin with—which is not the case for violent acts of rape. Therefore, unless poverty is more likely to “cause” someone to commit an act of rape than it is to “cause” them to commit an act of robbery, “poverty” is no explanation for the disparity in interracial rates of crime.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Could the disparity in interracial rates of rape be accounted for by disparities in interracial relationships—the fact that black men are more likely to date white women than white men are to date black women?

Even if so, it couldn’t possibly account for anywhere close to the total racial disparity in rape. Although black men who marry only marry white women 4.6% of the time, the NCVS data tells us that black men who rape chose white victims a staggering 50.2% of the time. The rate of interracial dating could be larger than the rate of interracial marriage, in theory, if black men are much more likely to marry the black women they date than they are to marry the white women they date, or if the particular black men who date the most white women are both unlikely to commit to marriage and much more likely to commit rape—but surely this number would still come nowhere close to accounting for that whopping 50%. And there is absolutely no reason to think either of these assumptions are true, anyway.

Approaching it from another angle, we can see that in 2009, there were 354,000 marriages of black men to white women, and 196,000 marriages of black women to white men. In other words, there are only about 1.8 times more marriages of black men to white women than there are marriages of black women to white men—but there are undeniably far more than 1.8 times more rapes of white women by black men in the United States each year than there are rapes of black women by white men. In fact, there are at least 839 times more. And while 26% of rapes are committed by a current or former partner, a combined 64% are committed by friends, acquaintances, or strangers.

Furthermore, somewhere between 15 to 25% of violent rapes committed in the United States are gang rapes, and as a Bureau of Justice Statistics report observes, “Strangers accounted for nearly 20% of the victimizations involving a single offender but 76% of the victimizations involving multiple offenders (a polite euphemism for gang rapes).” We find in another BJS report that in 2008, black offenders were responsible for 52.4% of all “multiple–offender sexual assaults” (see Table 48). However, no federal database keeps statistics on the race of victims of “multiple–offender sexual assaults”—even though they do tell us that “strangers” are selected more often, suggesting a reasonable possibility that the preference of black gang rapists for white victims could very well be even larger than the preference for white victims is for black rapists in general (obviously, the white:black ratio of strangers will almost always be larger for any given black individual in the United States than the white:black ratio of known acquaintances—in other words, any given black individual will almost always have more than 13% black friends and aquaintances). Is there a reason why race is reported for the offenders and victims in other cases, yet the statistics on gang rapes tell us the race of offenders but not victims? The race of victims of gang rape appears to be the only category here in which data on race is completely left out of the federal reports (unless I’ve overlooked it buried somewhere amongst all that data).

Until very recently, the federal crime reports classified Hispanics as “white” when they were the perpetrators of crimes—even though whites and Hispanics by the reports when they looked at victims. This policy was changed for the first time just this year (in 2015), and we now know that in 2012–2013, whites committed approximately 14 crimes per 1000 persons, while Hispanics committed approximately 18 crimes per 1000 persons. Not only was this skewing interracial crime statistics through the consequence that one Hispanic immigrant killing another became a “white”–on–minority crime, it was also inflating the actual “white” rate of violent crime. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect that this may have been an intentional means of partially obscuring the gap between black and white criminality (by averaging in with whites a group with slightly higher average criminality), as well as the gap between white–on–black and black–on–white crimes (by inventing a whole new imaginary set of interracial crimes to dilute the total with). And so, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect that something similar might be at play with the lack of race reporting in the single case of the demographics of victims of gang rapes (even though we know that they’re far more likely to be “strangers,” who as a rule are far more likely on principle to be non–black).

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

The evidence that a significant number of black rapists are deliberately targeting white victims is strong. And black rapists openly confessing to deliberately choosing to target white victims from racial motivation are hardly unheard of. Leroy Elridge Cleaver, who went on to become one of the most prominent members of the Black Panther Party (and later, a Republican), wrote a book in 1968 that was praised by the New York Times at the time as “brilliant and revealing”. In the fourth thematic section, titled “White Woman, Black Man”, he wrote: “[W]hen I considered myself ready enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically … Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women … I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spread outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”

There is yet another approach we can take to try to answer this question. Research on prisons finds that prison rape is in fact largely an act of black–on–white racial revenge—thus making prison rape an “institutional” form of suffering of which both whites, and men, are disproportionately likely to be the victims: “The fact remains that blacks continually and almost exclusively rape whites in prison. The evidence is based on studies conducted over the last 40 years (Davis 1968; Nacci 1978; Lookwood 1980; Starchild 1990). Why does this white victim preference prevail? Whites continue to be raped more severely and frequently and at a disproportionate rate than any other racial or ethnic group (in Gones 1967; Bowker 1980; Lookwood 9180). This racial inequality may be the largest in any violent crime committed in the United States. Rape in prison is rarely a sexual act, but one of violence, politics, and acting out power roles (Rideau and Wikberg 1992, p. 75). The act of rape in the ultra masculine world in prison constitutes the ultimate humiliation visited upon a male by forcing him to assume the role of a woman.

In American prisons, studies by sociologists suggest that more than 90% of rapes are inter-racial and may be motivated more by a need for sexual dominance over another race than by sexual passions (Starchild 1990, p. 145). Many rapes are by blacks on whites, suggesting that it is gives the lower–class black, who has felt trod upon all his life, his one chance to dominate a white person (Starchild 1990, p. 145). Consequently, the victims are almost always young white prisoners. Scacco (1982, p. 91) has also noted a disproportionate number of black aggressors and white victims in studies of sexual assaults in jails and prisons. Even if the minority of prisoners are black, the minority of victims are white (Sacco 1982, p. 91). When Lookwood (1980, p. 28) asked ‘targets’ to identify their aggressors at the time of their rape, most were black (80%), some were Hispanic (14%), and a few were white (6%).”

Once again, it is clear here that population rates do not account for the disparity. “Although many causation factors have been suggested for prison rape, they are all overshadowed by the racial categories of the victims and the rapists. Prison rape has been shown throughout this study to be racially motivated by predominantly black inmates specifically against white inmates who in turn are the victims. Although more studies need to be conducted to confirm this theory, racial hatred of whites by blacks appears to be the main force driving prison rape. In fact, the US Department of Justice (1991, p. 15) noted that black (57%) and Hispanic (51%) violent inmates were at least four times more likely than white (11%) violent inmates to have victimized someone of a different race or ethnic group.”

And this is true in prisons even though racial representation in the prison population comes far closer to parity than it does in the general population. When blacks are a minority of the general population, this is used to explain why black criminals end up with a disproportionate number of white victims. Yet, when blacks are a majority of the prison population, this, too is used to explain why black prison rapists end up with a disproportionate number of white victims. You can’t have it both ways. Deliberate targeting of white victims is very clearly a dramatic factor in interracial rates of rape. And why should the psychological factors confirmed to exist in the dynamics of rape inside prisons be any different when those same criminals are outside prison walls?

This, by the way, is an extremely significant finding of a form of suffering which is “institutional” in pattern which “anti–racists” don’t talk about. They advocate the idea that blacks can’t be racist, because “racism” means “prejudice plus power”—and blacks don’t have any power—as if the ability to shove your cock inside of a guy’s asshole and dominate and humiliate him isn’t a form of “power.” And as if all of that “white privilege” means shit on the inside of a cell.

[1] There is, however, perfectly reasonable evidence that biology just might in fact be relevant. A 1986 study from Ross, et al. titled “Serum testosterone levels in healthy young black and white men” found that the “twofold difference in prostate cancer risk” between black and white men could be explained by the “15% higher testosterone level” in Black men found after applying controls to the originally found 19% higher level for “age, weight, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and use of prescription drugs”.

But circulating levels of testosterone are not the only variable of interest. Many other factors, including enzyme activity and hormone exposure in utero, influence the impact of circulating hormones as well—and on these measures, too, we find generally consistent patterns in which Black subjects have the most androgenic hormone profile while East Asian subjects have least, with White subjects somewhere inbetween. A study from Ross, et al. in 1992, “5-apha-reductase activity and risk of prostate cancer among Japanese and US white and black males”, found that “white and black men had significantly higher values of 3 alpha, 17 beta androstanediol glucuronide (31% and 25% higher, respectively) and androsterone glucuronide (50% and 41% higher, respectively) than Japanese subjects”—these being enzymes that convert testosterone into the more physiologically active hormone DHT. Other studies, such as “Racial variation in umbilical cord blood sex steroid hormones and the insulin-like growth factor axis in African-American and white female neonates”, confirm that Black children are exposed to higher hormone levels in utero—this one found “higher testosterone (1.82 vs. 1.47 ng/mL, p=0.006) and the molar ratio of testosterone to SHBG (0.42 vs. 0.30, p=0.03) in African–American compared to white female neonates”.

And we know that hormone exposure in the womb has drastic impacts on future behavior: Girls who are born after congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that only briefly spikes the level of hormones a developing girl is exposed to, have significantly more masculine behavioral traits despite the fact that there is no evidence that parents treat them any differently, or that there is anything different about them or the way they are “socialized” other than excess prenatal male hormone exposure. As found in a 2003 study of “Prenatal androgens and gender-typed behavior”, girls with CAH “were more interested in masculine toys and less interested in feminine toys and were more likely to report having male playmates and to wish for masculine careers. Parents of girls with CAH rated their daughters’ behaviors as more boylike than did parents of unaffected girls. A relation was found between disease severity and behavior indicating that more severely affected CAH girls were more interested in masculine toys and careers. No parental influence could be demonstrated on play behavior, nor did the comparison of parents’ ratings of wished for behavior versus perceived behavior in their daughters indicate an effect of parental expectations. The results are interpreted as supporting a biological contribution to differences in play behavior between girls with and without CAH.”

Even further, It Is Not Just About Testosterone tells us that: “Vasopressin synthesis and the aromatization into estradiol both serve to facilitate testosterone’s effects.” And “Variation in the expression of monoamine oxidase A regulates the levels of neurotransmitters responsible for impulse control, potentially suppressing testosterone’s influence over behavior.” So, guess what? “Vasopressin secretion in normotensive black and white men and women on normal and low sodium diets” found that “24-h urinary excretion of vasopressin was significantly (P<0·05) higher in men than in women and higher (P<0·05) in black than in white subjects.” Meanwhile, the version of the MAOA gene associated with extreme impulsivity is found in “5.5% of Black men, 0.1% of Caucasian men, and 0.00067% of Asian men….” And a 2010 study from Kevin Beaver, a researcher in the field of biosocial criminology, titled “Genetic risk, parent-child relations, and antisocial phenotypes in a sample of African-American males,” even found that “a crude genetic index of [five] genes predicted adult violence and criminality more accurately than a detailed measure of the men’s childhood relationships with their mothers.”

The hypothesis that hormone exposure, particularly in the womb, can influence complex human behavioral traits, including the very traits that make up our “identities” over the long–term course of our lives, is entirely politically acceptable just so long as it is used to debunk the claim that homosexuality is a choice and show instead that homosexuality probably has a “hardwired” component. It’s even politically tolerable, most of the time, when used to explain behavioral differences between men and women. It only makes the transition from “this is a plausible hypothesis, and it might even be true” to “any bigot who even considers the possibility that this might be true should burn in Hell, and doesn’t even deserve a careful argument explaining why this is wrong” when the same precise logic it’s perfectly safe and acceptable to apply anywhere else is applied to race. And that should make it abundantly clear that this is more about politics than it is about truth.

Some writers have theorized that Roof’s action was the result of an undercurrent of racism so endemic to American society that one just can’t help internalizing it—and if someone takes it seriously enough, they’re almost inevitably going to take up arms and try to join the white supremacist race war America has been inspiring white males to wage for centuries.

In an article titled “White America Is Complicit”, a writer at Salon opines: “If you are shocked by any aspect of Roof’s story so far—including that he is being described in news outlets as “quiet and soft–spoken” instead of as a terrorist—you are not only willingly obtuse but complicit in his crime. There is a single conclusion to draw in this moment, and it is that we are here again, becausethis is exactly who we are. … Roof adorned his car with the same Confederate flag that once flew over slaveholding states and today waves over the South Carolina statehouse. America may be unwilling to face its history, despite a mounting pile of black bodies that forces African Americans to reckon with it daily. But Roof is more honest than those—and there are so many—whose complicity lies in looking the other way…”

Other headlines tell us how “White America Must Answer For” the Charleston shooting, or call him “The Product of a System that Has Bred Racist Hate for Centuries” and tell us that the shooting “is simultaneously representative and starkly indicative of the rampant racism structurally embedded in America, the responsibility for which, it might be argued, bears no exemption for any American, especially white Americans….” This is bullshit.

There is a far better way to address the ideological roots of Roof’s statements, and what actually inspired him.

But we’d have to acknowledge something many people are going to find quite unsavory in order to do it. To put it plainly, that fact is that Roof’s understanding of the original issue which became the grievance that motivated the development of his preoccupation with race was correct. To a degree worth exploring in detail, Roof was absolutely right about something—and it turned out to be the something that lied at the core of his entire transformation—at least as he describes it in his “manifesto.”

Those are statements that seem harsh on first glance, and I will inevitably take blowback for them (from people who write and appreciate absurd articles like those mentioned above, no doubt). But I take refuge in the fact that this article more than adequately details the facts that prove me right. Understanding the point I am actually making, and not just making recourse to turning me into some easily dispensed–with caricature, will take a little careful listening. There’s no easy way to make the point I need to make here—but it needs to be made, because it is true. And if you can calm your patellar reflexes, you just might actually learn something.

We are simply not really going to have any grasp on what could have been done about it, or what could be done to deter similar incidents, unless and until we recognize, understand, and admit that. And this no more implies sympathy for Roof’s abhorrent acts of violence than it implies sympathy for the 2001 World Trade Center attacks to acknowledge that some of the grievances against U.S. foreign policy which fueled Osama Bin Laden may in fact have been valid grievances—in fact, while it is leftists who will have the strongest taboo against the statements I have just made in the last paragraph, they have been the ones telling us all along that it is self–defeating blindness to think that Islamic terrorists merely hate us “for our freedoms”—writers like Noam Chomsky write that “They don’t hate us for our democracy, they hate us because we … have devastated the civilian society of Iraq … they know, even if we pretend not to, that there has been a brutal military occupation, now going into its 35th year, which has relied crucially on U.S. support — diplomatic support, military support, economic support [in Israel–Palestine] … And many people may notice something else: the U.S. has criminals, internally… major criminals. Other countries are asking for their extradition, want them handed over, and the U.S. won’t do it….” Noam Chomsky says things like this, and Bin Laden reads his books, and that’s perfectly fine. Many leftists are careful to demand we recognize that appreciating Chomsky’s points is still not a justification for Bin Laden’s actions (not even if Bin Laden himself seems to think so); but simply something we must understand if we want any chance of stopping him (and others who will be inspired by the same grievances which motivated him unless these are addressed).

That brings us to Dylann Roof.

The key paragraph of Roof’s racist manifesto explaining his transformation from someone who “was not raised in a racist home or environment”into what he became was this: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I read the Wikipedia article and … It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. … this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. … I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

In articles like Alternet’s “Dylann Roof is Not Alone”, written by Chauncey Devega of ‘We Are Respectable Negroes’, we read that: “Black America is disgusted by how media will, as it always does, depict Dylann Roof as a lone shooter with mental health issues, as they humanize him in order to put the murderous violence in some type of context. By comparison, the American corporate news media is not neutral in how it depicts white criminals as compared to blacks, Latinos, Asians, First Nations Peoples, Arabs, or Muslims.”

We’ve already taken a close look at Devega’s first sentence’s claim in the first part of this series.

Now regarding his second: in fact, a study published in early 2015 found that across the years of 2008–2012, whereas 40% of the perpetrators of all violent crimes committed were black, across 146 episodes of breaking news on MSNBC, FOX, CNN, CBS, PBS, NBC, and Univision, only 20% of the crimes reported on had black perpetrators. Black–perpetrated crimes across several recent years were in fact not overreported, but underreported.

Of course, the authors of that study inevitably try to find a moral to draw that supports the pre–existing liberal narrative which their very own data obviously undermines. They argue that it’s a problem that blacks are “invisible” on TV news because not only are they underrepresented as perpetrators of violent crimes, they’re also underrepresented as victims—Table 3 on page 32 shows that despite being 48% of the victims of violent crimes across this period of time, they were represented as victims only 22% of the time. So even though this very same author had argued just a few years earlier that black overrepresentation was a dire problem, not it’s black underrepresentation that is the problem. (I’ll eventually have more to say about the ways in which the battle for social justice is a struggle that just can’t ever be won: if minorities are overrepresented amongst military recruits, then that’s because America is using them as cheap fodder for war because we consider them expendable. If minorities are underrepresented amongst military recruits, then that’s because America doesn’t consider them good enough to fight for our country just like everyone else.)

Nevermind that this “underrepresentation” of African–Americans as victims is a consequence precisely of the combination of two facts put together: first, that African–Americans commit a disproportionate amount of the crime in the United States to begin with; and second, that so many of the victims they choose are African–American. Blacks are responsible for approximately half of almost all of the violent crimes committed in the United States. In the case of murder, approximately 85% of the victims they choose are black; for most other crimes, the number is closer to 50%. Meanwhile, only a very small percentage of crimes perpetrated by whites involve black victims (I spell out these statistics in much more detail shortly and elsewhere). Cut black murderers in half in the statistics, and blacks will actually then be fewer than 22% of the victims of murder—making black victims overrepresented here given the underreporting on cases with black perpetrators.

I may also have more to say about this study and the way its results were portrayed in the future, but for now suffice it to say that white–on–black crimes are so rare, and black–on–black crimes such a large fraction of total crime, that these numbers inevitably mean crimes with black victims were still very disproportionately likely to be displayed at least in the proportionally rare occasions that they didn’t have black perpetrators: blacks victims of violent crime became invisible when black perpetrators of violent crime did precisely because there are proportionally so few non–black acts of violence against blacks to begin with.

In any case, the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin case Dylann Roof’s manifesto talks about was partially responsible for that disparity in news coverage across this period of time (the case originally surfaced in late 2012, the ending of the study’s time frame)—so it’s time to take a refresher course on what actually happened in that case, and the abusively slanted way the media originally portrayed it, the consequences of which still last to this day.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

For a random sample of the general impression many hold of the Zimmerman/Martin case, Breaking Brown speaks about “Zimmerman’s history of calling 911 to report mostly suspicious black males.” This was a very prevalent belief, especially throughout the early stages of the story—Zimmerman is a wannabe cop, and he’s playing out his action hero fantasies on black people. But what does Zimmerman’s record actually show? Zimmerman made a total of 44 calls in the 8 years leading up to the Trayvon Martin incident. And just 6 of that total involved black suspects. Meanwhile, 2 of those 6 were in regards to the home invasion of Olivia Beltaran—and it was Beltaran who, while hiding in her bedroom, called 911 and described the perpetrators as two black men. Zimmerman brought Beltaran a new deadlock because hers wasn’t working, and later on two separate occasion saw the same two suspects matching Beltaran’s description. And there is evidence that Zimmerman actually had, in fact, identified the correct suspects.

In another one of those cases, “the male appeared to him to be casing Frank Taafe’s house, located at the shortcut from the main road. Zimmerman said the guy kept walking up to Taafe’s house and away from it, and he knew the guy didn’t live there. By the time police arrived, the male had left. Taaffe was out of town.” Zimmerman reported the suspect’s race in this case because “I know the resident, he’s Caucasian”—so the suspect clearly can’t be the home’s owner. Once again, race had a perfectly valid reason for being relevant. Zimmerman wasn’t obsessed with black suspects. The calls he did make about black suspects were perfectly proportionate to the number of black suspects actually committing crimes at Twin Peaks.

The media widely spread the myth that Zimmerman used the phrase “fucking coons” during his 911 call. But, “In the end, Tuchman, the audio expert and special guest host Wolf Blitzer — who was filling in for Anderson Cooper — all agreed that the word in question was “cold,” not the racial slur. … the reason some say that would be relevant, is because it was unseasonably cold in Florida that night and raining….” This also makes a hell of a lot more sense of the “it’s” that can faintly be heard preceding the sentence: “It’s fucking cold” is a much more plausible sentence than “It’s fucking coons.” It turned out that while Zimmerman never used a racial slur towards Martin, Martin did use one towards Zimmerman—and regardless of the comparative offensiveness of anti–white and anti–black racial slurs, if these would have told us something about Zimmerman’s state of mind, so they should tell us something about Martin’s.

Even more egregiously, when Zimmerman calls 911, he isn’t sure about Martin’s race—he has that famous hoodie on, after all, and it’s raining and dark and Zimmerman is somewhere behind the hoodie’d Martin in a vehicle. At 0:08, Zimmerman simply describes Martin as “a real suspicious guy.” At 0:27, the dispatcher asks: “Okay, and this guy, is he black, white, or Hispanic?” Zimmerman responds with a very clear note of uncertainty: “He LOOKS black,” in a tone that implies a following “BUT I’m not entirely sure.” My interpretation of Zimmerman’s tone at this point is bolstered by the fact that when Martin turns back in Zimmerman’s direction and starts scoping him out at 1:00, allowing Zimmerman the first chance at getting a closer, and more head–on look, Zimmerman takes the first opportunity to (at 1:10) confirm, “And he’s a black male.”

When NBC first presented this audio, they literally edited the tape to give the very overwhelming—and overwhelmingly misleading—impression that Zimmerman brought up Martin’s race both immediately and unprompted, opening the call by saying: “He looks up to no good. He LOOKS black.” (See this YouTube video for a comparison, and skip to 1:28 to NBC’s edit first.)

Lost in all this hysteria were details like the fact that two years earlier, in 2010, Zimmerman had protested, passed out fliers to black churches, and even spoke at an NAACP meeting agitating to bring repercussions to a cop who punched a homeless black man and failed to be charged or punished for the incident despite video evidence. (“Collison turned himself in … on Jan. 3, 2011 [and] agreed to pay for Ware’s medical bills and make donations to nonprofit organizations, including the NAACP.”)

When the Zimmerman/Martin case first broke, those who were paying attention in 2012 will remember that the media heavily relied on these two photos of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, in presenting the case:

Who could possibly believe there was any plausibility to Zimmerman’s version of events—on which it was Martin who doubled back after Zimmerman to tackle him to the ground—with these images flashing at them every time the case was discussed? Without question, what we saw was a systematic pattern of lies and distortions during the early period of reporting about this case. Had the bias ran in the other direction, it would have looked like this, and few would have failed to recognize how offensively and manipulatively distorted the images were:

In fact, this comparison would have been more accurate than the photos that were actually used (though still unreasonable—photos shouldn’t be chosen to sway opinion in either direction), as both of the above photos were much more recent than the ones that were used. Suddenly, Zimmerman’s version of events would have appeared far more plausible and worth taking seriously—it might not have seemed so obvious to the public that Zimmerman must have stalked Martin straight down and shot him in cold blood.

An even more recent and realistic comparison less biased to either side might have looked something like:

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

In general, the most central complaint about Zimmerman’s actions is the supposition that he followed Martin, directly provoking the final confrontation by cornering Martin down a dark road or alleyway even if he didn’t throw the first punch. Frequently, this complaint adds that Zimmerman did this against police orders that he stay in his car, which Zimmerman deliberately obeyed. So let’s take a listen to the actual 911 call and see what answers we can determine about that. From 0:00 to 1:35, Zimmerman gives his complaint that “it looks like [this guy is] on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around looking about … just staring … and now he’s staring at me!” In response to questions, he gives description to the dispatcher of Martin’s appearance and location.

Notably, the dispatcher never says anythingabout whether or not Zimmerman can, or should, get out of his car. At 1:35, we hear movement: the sound of the chime of a car with an open door, followed by Zimmerman’s car door shutting. He sighs and says with a tone of passive resignation, “Ahhh, they always get away…” At 1:45, Zimmerman is only now doing what could possibly be called “following” Martin—we can very clearly hear the sound of wind rushing through Zimmerman’s phone.

And the dispatcher continues asking questions about Martin’s location—while getting out of his car, Zimmerman says: “He’s down towards the, uh, the entrance of the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asks: “Okay. Which entrance is that that he’s heading towards?” And Zimmerman responds: “The back entrance.” Only now, presumably in response to the unmistakable sound of wind rushing through the speakers for the last ten seconds, the dispatcher at 1:54 asks, “Are you following him?” And Zimmerman responds, “Yeah.” The dispatcher replies again: “Okay. We don’t need you to do that.” And at 2:00, Zimmerman calmly says, “Okay.”

Nevermind that, as the dispatcher himself testified, this was just a “suggestion” in the first place—not so much any kind of command as a ‘we don’t need you to do that’—‘that isn’t a requirement for our purposes.’ An actual quote from the testimony: “We’re directly liable if we give a direct order … We always try to give general basic … not commands, just suggestions.” So, “We don’t need you to do that” is different than a more direct “Don’t do that.”

At 2:05–2:10, the dispatcher asks: “Alright, sir, what is your name?” And Zimmerman responds: “George.” After a slight pause, he adds: “ … He ran.” And at this point, the sound of wind rushing through the phone stops entirely. So, assuming that the wind only rushed through Zimmerman’s speakers while he was speed–walking in the direction Martin was running, and never simply when the breeze blew Zimmerman’s way, the total evidence we have for Zimmerman “stalking” Martin is a maximum 25 seconds, the full duration for which Martin was either nearly or completely out of Zimmerman’s sight. And Zimmerman actually does stop after the dispatcher informs him that following Martin isn’t necessary, even though this was not an order, nor even a request that he stop—merely letting Zimmerman know that the dispatchers don’t require him to do it. Zimmerman does in fact stop, at this point, anyway.

A far cry from the suggestion that Zimmerman compelled Martin to fight back by stalking him down into a corner.

And these distortions were not a coincidence. A report from Ernhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman titled “The battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a media controversy online and off–line” investigated the “phases” of reporting on the case. After a first “act” that consisted solely of local reporting within Florida, “The second “act” of the story begins on 7–8 March, ten days after Martin’s death, when the story received a new wave of media attention from two of the national media’s largest outlets … This resurgence in interest was the direct result of efforts to publicize the story. Martin’s family was able to enlist the legal services of civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on a pro bono basis. Crump had taken on a previous civil rights case and failed to convict, which he attributed to an inadequate media strategy prior to the trial itself (Caputo, 2012). Crump brought on local lawyer Natalie Jackson, who enlisted the pro bono services of publicist Ryan Julison. … Within a day of joining the effort, Julison attracted significant media coverage. He began reaching out to the largest national media sources (as measured by audience reach) and worked his way down until he found interest from Reuters and CBS This Morning. … Huffington Post, … an important early amplifier…, misreported that Zimmerman was white….” They conclude that “broadcast media … is susceptible to media activists working through participatory media to co–create the news and influence the framing of major controversies. … Benjamin Crump’s strategy to focus PR efforts on broadcast media with national reach was astute.”

It is this kind of media network dedicated solely to bringing attention and outrage to (supposed) black victims that is lacking in cases like Dillon Taylor’s which lead to disproportionate awareness of black and white victims of police brutality (and interracial civilian violence) as a whole. Even more background on the story of how the same lawyer who later took over the Michael Brown case and invested his defense in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” lie worked with a PR company (with a history of sleights of truth of its own) to spin their narrative fast to the mainstream media to create the distortions of truth that marked the early stages of awareness of the Zimmerman/Martin case can be found (albeit with more partisan polemic than I’d have preferred) at The Conservative Treehouse.

That leaves hardly two minutes for Zimmerman and Martin to encounter each other, and for the entire fight to run its course, for which we don’t have direct observational evidence. However, what we do have are very straightforward lines of surrounding evidence that make an account of what actually happened in this two minutes very clear.

One of the most relevant details produced by the prosecution’s key witness, Rachel Jeantel, was this: “I asked [Trayvon Martin] where he at. He told me he at the back of his daddy fiancee house like in the area where his daddy fiancee — by his daddy fiancee house. I said, you better keep running. He said, no, he lost him.”

We can combine that with the addresses of known locations to create a geographical timeline of events.

1 is the first location which Zimmerman gives the dispatcher immediately after beginning his phone call to 911 (1111 Retreat View Circle; the clubhouse). 2 is the approximate location at which Zimmerman parked his car, though it may have been closer to 1 than this. (“If they come in through the gate, tell them to go straight past the club house, and uh, straight past the club house and make a left, and then they go past the mailboxes, that’s my truck”). 3 is the location at which Zimmerman ended his phone call to 911—in the 25 seconds during which Zimmerman “follows” Martin before stopping in response to the dispatcher’s statement, the distance he travels is from 2 to 3. 4 is the location of Brandy Latreca Green (Martin’s “daddy’s fiancee”)’s home, where Martin was staying. (Per the NYT). 5 is where the police arrived to find Zimmerman bloodied and Martin unresponsive.

Now, the autopsy found that the only injuries on Trayvon’s body apart from the gunshot were those on his own knuckles. The responding officer observed that the back of Zimmerman’s jacket was wet and covered in grass, consistent with Zimmerman’s account that Martin had pinned him to the ground. There were lacerations to the back of his head exactly consistent with his account that Martin was shoving his head into the concrete—call Zimmerman’s injuries minor all you want; but if his injuries were minor, he was lucky. Anyone who doesn’t think this is a perfectly valid situation in which to become afraid for your life is an idiot: it takes almost nothing(warning: violent video) to take someone out this way—a single lucky hit this way can easily kill you, render you unconscious long enough to allow an assailant to kill you by some other means, or simply leave you alive with traumatic brain injury for the rest of your life.

More importantly, Zimmerman consistently stated that hedidn’t know where Trayvon Martin was, right up until the very end of the phone call at (3) when he declines to tell the dispatcher his address for that reason—and Rachel Jeantel testified that he had made it back to the back yard of his daddy’s fiancee’s house (4) when the call dropped. This means the final showdown could not have happened unless Martin doubled back after Zimmerman. The known evidence therefore does not even allow for the interpretation that Zimmerman approached Martin first. While the skin on Martin’s knuckles was broken, Zimmerman had no injuries consistent with aggressive violence. Together, all these facts make it clear that it could only have been Zimmerman’s voice screaming for help on the ensuing neighborhood 911 calls.

All of this backs the complaint against Zimmerman up all the way back to “he shouldn’t have called the cops at all.” People who use this critique have probably never lived in a gated community. Every single entrance to Twin Lakes features the following sign, making it perfectly clear to every visitor what rules apply once inside: “We report all suspicious persons….” You consent to those rules once you walk inside.

According to Vox, we should “Stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism. It’s bigoted and Islamophobic.”

There’s a certain ritual that each and every one of the world’s billion–plus Muslims, especially those living in Western countries, is expected to go through immediately following any incident of violence involving a Muslim perpetrator. … Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: “As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form.” This expectation we place on Muslims, to be absolutely clear, is Islamophobic and bigoted. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for Islam and for Muslims. The implication is that every Muslim is under suspicion of being sympathetic to terrorism unless he or she explicitly says otherwise. … This sort of thinking — blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their identity — is the very definition of bigotry. … we should treat the assumptions that compel this ritual — that Muslims bear collective responsibility … as flatly bigoted ideas with no place in our society. There is no legitimate reason for Muslim groups to need to condemn the monsters who attacked Charlie Hebdo….

A Muslimah at the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, in an article titled I’m Sorry I Won’t Internalize Collective Responsibility, concurs:

While politicians and Islamophobes alike continue to pressure the Muslim community into nonsensical apologies based on a homogenized identity, many Muslims have, unfortunately, internalized the narrative of collective responsibility, leading them to issue condemnations of acts of violence and terrorism based only on the fact that we share one piece of our identity. Coupled with the ever present voice of those calling for Muslims to speak out against Muslim terrorists, those who have stepped up to this plate, have not presented a counter–narrative as they purport, but rather an internalization of the dominant narrative where Muslims are guilty until proven innocent.

Nevermind if polling frequently finds legitimate reason for concern—nevermind if 2007 Pew research finds that amongst American Muslims under the age of 30, 26% believe that suicide bombings can be justified, while 27% “decline to express an opinion” when asked how they view al–Qaeda (with an additional 5% viewing them somewhat, or very, favorably). Nevermind if in the UK, 78% of Muslims think anyone who publishes cartoons of Muhammad should be prosecuted and 62% explicitly oppose the very principle of freedom of speech.

In the most recent Pew research of worldwide Muslim support for suicide bombings, Jay Michaelson writes that: “There are approximately 1,083,021,825 Muslims in the 21 countries they polled—68% of the global total. Based on the country–by–country percentages in the Pew report, that means about 133 million support the suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilians. Extrapolating the data—which is probably inaccurate since American and European Muslims probably support violence significantly less, while Iranian Muslims may support it more—that means about 195 million Muslims worldwide support suicide bombing and other acts of violence against civilians.”

Despite every bit of this, the default position of the left is that to even expect mainstream Muslims to denounce violence is bigotry. A tolerated and respected position along that spectrum is that it caves in to that bigotry even for well–meaning Muslims to denounce violence with sincere intentions, and this should stop. Most leftists would say that a far more pressing concern when it comes to our response to acts of terrorism committed by Muslims should be to see to it that acts or even mere attitudes of retaliation do not form against other innocent Muslims in response.

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I’m not trying to raise alarmist panic about Islam; but here’s the point: if we replace al–Qaeda with Stormfront, and we replace Muslims with white people, what above represents the “anti–racist” orthodoxy becomes something we would not expect to read anywhere outside of white supremacy circles. What we’re morally required to say about violent Muslim is what we’re morally prohibited from saying about violent whites, and what we’re morally required to say about violent whites is what we’re morally prohibited from saying about Muslims.

Imagine how the results would be reported if a full 26% of young white Americans polled believed that knowingly killing innocent black civilians in the process of responding to black criminal violence could sometimes be justified—say, by police deliberately bombing an entire housing project to take out a black killer instead of doing their best to apprehend the perpetrator alone—could sometimes be justified. Imagine how the results would be reported if a full 27% “declined to express an opinion” about major neo–Nazi groups, with a further 5% having somewhat or very favorable views. Would the media be praising the tolerance of white Americans in contrast to, say, white South Africans if it was found that 81% of white Americans said that attacks on innocent civilians in defense of Christianity were never justified—whereas nearly 1 in 5 failed, for one reason or another, to agree with this—in contrast to only 72% of white South Africans?

If you were to see someone making the following statement, who would you peg them to be? What would you assume to be the ideological position they were arguing from?: “Many white people have, unfortunately, internalized the narrative of white America’s collective responsibility for acts like those committed by Dylann Roof, leading them to issue condemnations of acts of violence and terrorism based only on the fact that we share one piece of our identity. There’s a certain ritual of apology that white people are expected to go through immediately following any incident of racist violence against black victims involving a white perpetrator. … This expectation we place on white people, to be absolutely clear, is anti–white bigotry. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for being white. The implication is that every white person is under suspicion of being sympathetic to racist violence unless he or she explicitly says otherwise.” Where would you expect to see comments like these supported and condoned? Stormfront? American Rennaisance? Rush Limbaugh, at the very least?

But even the conservatives at Breitbart.com had no difficulty calling Dylann Roof “pure evil.”

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Yet, in contrast to all this, a simple search for the words “white responsibility Dylann Roof” gives me as a top result the following article from Psychology Today: “To admit that I’m white like Roof is to feel guilty …. But guilt is not enough. Nor are apologies. … Perhaps most painfully, it means doing the hard work of taking responsibility for Dylann Roof’s whiteness because he is white like me.” An article posted at Salon and Alternet sends a similar message—the opening words of the article’s title: White America is Complicit. The article begins: “In so many ways, the story of Dylann Roof, the shooting suspect who allegedly killed nine people in an historic South Carolina black church, is a parallel to the story of America itself.”

What would we call it if someone said, “The story of [pick any Muslim terrorist] is a parallel to the violent story of how Muhammad founded the religion of Islam itself?” Oh, right—that would beIslamophobia. Much less if that same writer continued—as the author of the Alternet piece does—to say: “But [the Islamic terrorist] is more honest than those—and there are so many—whose complicity lies in looking the other way, in denying [the history of Islam], in pretending that each new [Islamic act of violence] is an isolated anomaly.” That would be Islamophobia to the extreme.

With a nod to Aurelius Pundit, this imagecaptures the hypocrisy rather succinctly:

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That Alternet article addresses a prevalent sentiment when it complains that “the cops were careful to take him alive, which even the most innocent of black folks cannot count on.” Not only that—but they even gave him a bulletproof vest.

And the claims generated on the witch hunt to find “white privilege” keep getting worse: this photo made the rounds on Twitter, with the caption: “white privilege is murdering 9 people and then having the police give you a bullet proof vest but not handcuffs.”

Nevermind the fact that it’s clearly the left arm of the man behind Dylann in the top–left photo hanging free, not Dylann’s, apparently giving anyone the impression that his hands were free. Nevermind that in the thirty seconds it takes to load Google and type in Dylann’s name, any photo that gives you a view of his side, back, or legs would show clearly that he was both handcuffed and cuffed around the ankles:

History lesson: in October of 2002, 42–year old convicted murderer and Nation of Islam member John Allen Muhammad and his 17–year–old partner Lee Boyd Malvo planned to kill six white people per day “to terrorize the nation”, including plans to bomb school buses and children’s hospitals: “He wanted to kill a policeman, then set off a bomb at his funeral.” Over the course of three weeks, ten people were killed and three more were critically injured.

Guess what it looked like when Lee Boyd Malvo was captured by police:

No heads are cracking and no guns are being pointed at anyone in this picture.

That white thing? Yeah, that’s a bulletproof vest.

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One of the more pernicious myths—pernicious because it tries to discredit a really serious issue through its dishonesty in trying to make the issue all about race—is that we only talk about mental illness when a killer is white. This article from Alternet, for example, was titled: “It’s Not About Mental Illness: The Big Lie That Always Follows Mass Shootings By White Males.” Always—nevermind that the article doesn’t quote a single person who claimed Dylann Roof was mentally ill so we can judge what they actually said for ourselves. For my part, I can’t actually remember hearing this claim happen once until I heard sources like Mr. Chu here raving about how we “always” do it. And after asking around, I can’t find anyone else I know, even amongst my many politically oriented friends, who heard anyone dismiss Roof as “mentally ill” either. Let’s just push that to the side—I’m sure somebody said it. (Right? Sure. Whatever.)

Alright, … well, it’s time for a few more history lessons.

In 1993, Nathan Dunlap gunned down 5 people in a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Colorado to “get even” after he was fired for declining to work extra hours. The Colorado Observer tells us that “In their clemency petition, they contend that Dunlap … had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was experiencing his first mania episode the night of Dec. 14, 1993 … ” when he opened fire. A CBS News article on “Mass Shootings and Mental Illness” discusses “Colin Ferguson [who, in 1993] killed six commuters on a New York Train.” In 2009, Maurice Clemmons murdered four police officers and continued to evade capture for two further days—“the largest number of law enforcement officers killed by one man in a single incident in U.S. history”. The Huffington Post published an article titled: “Maurice Clemmons: Mental Illness Does Cause Violence”.

At The Washington Post, we see that “Muhammad’s [the DC sniper’s] attorneys had argued that the sniper is mentally ill and that he should have been granted a competency hearing before his trial, at which he represented himself briefly.” And The Associated Press published the following headline about his accomplice: “Psychologist: Malvo Has Mental Disease.” In fact, Malvo was spared the death penalty for his part in the racist rampage because of that presumed mental disease (dissociative disorder from brainwashing). Lest I sound wholly unsympathetic to that judgment, I note that even after conviction, Malvo continued expressing what appeared to be genuine remorse for the impact that Muhammad had had on him, making genuine calls to and letters for his past victims—so it appears this may well have been the right call.

Most telling of all, the argument here is really that white racists only want to talk about mental illness when a killer is white—as a disingenuous way of humanizing them, simply because of sympathy due to the fact that they’re white—so take a look at what the white conservatives at The American Thinker did here. Guess what? When a black guy published a manifesto and went out killing, they talked about the impacts of mental illness and the consequences of psychotropic drugs! So much for that racial double standard. Even the white conservative troglodytes you’d expect to be its worst offenders aren’t guilty of it.

You may remember the rampage that began in February of 2013 when a black ex–cop, Christopher Dorner, declared “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” on the LAPD in response to his firing from the department. As one of his first actions, he shot Monica Quan and her fiancé Keith Lawrence in the parking garage of their condominium simply because Monica was the daughter of Randal Quan, who had represented him at the hearing where he reported Theresa Evans for an alleged case of excessive force—even though Randal had opposed his firing. Large numbers of leftists found this “kind of exciting,” as did the Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Columbia University, Marc Lamont Hill, when he said “he’s been like a real–life superhero to many people. … many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people; they’re rooting for someone who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching ‘Django Unchained’ in real life.”

Nevermind that Dorner’s ex–girlfriend described him as “twisted” and “super paranoid” in a posting at “DontDateHimGirl.com,” to which Dorner unsuccessfully tried to file a restraining order against her, or that the female officer Dorner claimed had used excessive force had submitted a performance review stating he needed improvement the literal day before he made the charge of excessive force, or that none of the three hotel employees who witnessed most of the event saw Evans kick the suspect in question, as Dorner had claimed—the evidence here was, at the very least, ambiguous.

It’s not as if Hill was alone in his sentiment. A number of much larger pages were shut down on Facebook in February 2013—for example, see the broken link in the third paragraph of this 2013 article—but one of the largest ones still has over 17,000 fans. The I Support Christopher Dorner page, with more than 14,000 fans, was started by someone who, according to The Huffington Post, wanted to steer the conversation away from Dorner’s mental health: “I knew that the media was going to turn this into just another ‘He’s a psycho ex–cop ex–military that went insane’ story… There is a huge underlying story of police corruption and the plight of a man that tried his best to do good and was relentlessly punished for it.”

So, talking about mental illness is a despicable way to humanize white killers, and only white killers, by making us sympathize with their plight and personal struggles, and we only do this for white killers because we’re racists who only humanize whites—exceptwhen we do it for non–white killers, in which case we’re simply dismissing non–white killers’ valid grievances … because we are, once again, racists no matter what.

Incidentally, the word “terrorism” wasn’t applied to Dorner’s spree until it had gone a full ten days in. Similarly, when Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan, who opposed our involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, killed 13 people and injured 30 more after extended contact with Anwar al–Awlaki, the U.S. government classified this not as “terrorism” but instead as an act of “workplace violence.” Perhaps there are reasons other than race that explain why some acts of violence are called “terrorism” and not others?

In 2010, a 43–year–old Asian man named James Lee entered the Discovery Channel building and proceeded to take hostages, carrying a handgun and wearing what he wanted observers to believe was an explosive device. His motives were revealedin a manifesto originally posted at SaveThePlanetProtest.com: “The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots … on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. … Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! … Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet! … Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. … For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!”

Despite the obvious ideology of Lee’s manifesto, it’s safe to say no one should hold their breath waiting on the mainstream media, or Alternet or Salon, to pin even any partial blame for Lee’s action on people like Al Gore, or extreme predictions like his 2007 statement that the polar icecaps would be completely melted by 2013, a prediction which “if anything … is already too conservative.” (In fact, that prediction that was “proven to be off… by 920,000 square miles”; 2013 blew away the record for icecap growth). Suddenly, the same people raving that talking about mental illness is just a disingenuous “way to avoid saying other terms like ‘toxic masculinity’” will realize that it’s perfectly sensible to think Lee might have been bothmentally unstable and influenced by environmentalist rhetoric to go to this extreme becausehe was hearing and interpreting all of it through a mental state that was imbalanced to begin with.

Sane people, they may perfectly well suddenly see the sensibility of telling us, don’t think holding hostages in a Discovery Channel office is a proper way to deal with global warming, pollution, and wildlife extinction, even if everything Lee said about them was correct. Suddenly, someone taking extreme actions in part due to mental illness, and latching on to a political ideology at the same time, don’t seem so mutually exclusive. The vast majority of people who care about wildlife extinction or consider pollution a serious issue still don’t go holding hostages at news stations. The vast majority of people who believe the trial against George Zimmerman was a politically motivated farce or believe double standards are expressed when the media spends months on end searching and distorting every possible aspect of this case for racism that turned out to be nonexistent (see below) while downplaying or ignoring countless more cases of black–on–white violence[1] over the same period of time still don’t think trying to initiate an all–out “race war” is a good idea. What makes the people who do these things, in either case, different? Mental illness is one perfectly reasonable possibility.

On February 10, 2015, a white man in Chapel Hill, North Carolina walked into the home of three Syrian– and Jordanian–Americans, killing them execution–style. A few early reports claimed in haste that the man, Craig Stephen Hicks, was a “Christian terrorist.” In fact, Hicks turned out to be not only an atheist whose Facebook profile photo was the LGBT–themed “Atheists for Equality” and whose Facebook cover photo pronounced in bold letters his “ANTI–THEISM,” but a long–standing fan of progressive causes ranging from “HuffPost Black Voices” to “Forward Progressives” to “The Atheist Empathy Campaign,” to Rachel Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

How did the writers at Alternet respond? By stating that, that while many have “portrayed Hicks as a liberal, by reporting his Facebook likes included Rachel Maddow, gay marriage groups, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others … that relabeling is absurd on many levels, because Hicks appears to fit the psychological profile of violent extremists—regardless of their ideological stripes….” Once again: suddenly the fact that violent extremists might fit a certain psychological profile regardless of their ideological stripes isn’t so foreign to progressives.

Meanwhile, searching Google for the words “Craig Stephen Hicks mental illness” returns a mere fourteen pages of results, most of which note that Hicks’ ex–wife believed he had a mental illness (video) and add that his current wife’s divorce attorney observed that it’s obviously “not within the range of normal behavior for someone to shoot three people over parking issues,” and the rest of which either pick the terms up across unrelated articles or catch comments like one Sheikh Muhammad Arslan’s at Buzzfeed: “This douche–bag can’t get away with it because he has a “’mental illness”’ and “’issues in his oh-so-difficult life” etc.” Where in God’s name is this epidemic of white people justifying white violence by excusing it as mental illness?!

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As happens so often, the author of the Salon piece’s interest in race isn’t merely misguided, it becomes so narrowly overemphasized that it overshadows the truth about other, highly important questions. The author writes: ““The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop–out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health….”

If Arthur Chu thinks mental illness is “a goddamn cop–out,” then Arthur Chu doesn’t know what he’s goddamn talking about. He worries that “the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day….” When most of us worry about mental illness in an event like this, we aren’t worrying about a diagnosis of dysthymia or social anxiety; we’re worried about extreme cases of things like psychosis and schizophrenia. And do you know who else hurts people every single day? Psychotics and schizophrenics.

A 2009 meta–analysis, “Psychosis as a risk factor for violence to others”, found that “compared with individuals with no mental disorders, people with psychosis seem to be at a substantially elevated risk for violence … [Psychosis is] significantly associated with a 49%–68% increase in the odds of violence.” A 2007 study, “Major Mental Disorders and Violence”, states that “recent longitudinal investigations reported … community violence related to [major medical disorders] … reaching 15% to 20%.” A 2010 study in Sweden, “Bipolar disorder and violent crime”, found that among 3700 individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 8.4% had committed at least one act of violence, compared to 3.5% of the general population. A 2009 study in the same area, “Schizophrenia, substance abuse, and violent crime”, found that the number for schizophrenics was 13.2% (although concurrent use of drugs accounted for some of this increase).

Mental illness is a serious issue, and it does have a relationship with violence. Regardless whether it even bears any relevance to Roof’s particular case (and again, I haven’t seen even a single person seriously suggest that it did to begin with), that’s worth being aware of, and it’s worth keeping in mind, and it’s worth looking for evidence for. The “real problems” Chu thinks it distracts us away from are, of course, rooted in Chu’s own blinkered, partisan worldview which spins cosmological narratives out of the actions of Eliot Rodgers and Dylann Roof while conveniently forgetting about those of people like James Lee, Floyd Corkins, Karl Pierson, or the DC snipers—or even 44–year–old female Professor Amy Bishop who shot and killed six colleagues execution–style after she was denied tenure at the University of Alabama for erratic behavior and inadequate research (it later turned out that an incident previously ruled to have been an accident wasn’t: it turned out she had killed her 18–year–old brother with a shotgun when she was 21). Again, as Alternet itself knows, killers tend to fall into a particular “psychological profile … regardless of their ideological stripes … .”

Even Hugo Schwyzer, writing incorrectlyabout “Why Most Serial Killers Are Privileged White Men” (as I discuss later, in fact they are not), complains that “After Seung–Hui Cho killed 32 people in Blacksburg [at Virginia Tech], media attention focused on the likelihood that a Korean culture unwilling to acknowledge mental illness helped drive the young man to commit the worst mass murder in U.S. history.” Once again, when we do wonder about how mental illness impacted non–white killers, that’s because we’re racists who want to put them down, just like when we wonder about how mental illness impacted white killers, it’s because we’re racists who want to raise them up. Nevermind that the source Hugo references in the hyperlink in that sentence quotes … who’s that, again? “Dong Woo Seo, a physician at Han Byul Mental Hospital in Seoul”. Surely Hugo’s intention was to try to say something about white racial blindness, and not about what Korean physicians who treat mental illness think about how Korean culture treats mental illness?!

As the authors at The American Thinker wrote while discussing the rampage of the renegade black cop Christopher Dorner, “I’ve found that once you’ve restored your patients’ brains to healthy and normal functioning by following the diagnostic and treatment method outlined above, your patients will be doing very well without the psychobabble. People with healthy brains almost invariably find they no longer need to discuss their “issues.” It’s called the indomitable human spirit, and it’s present in every human I’ve ever treated whose brain function has been restored to normalcy….” Chu complains that “When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore what they say about their own actions and motivations …,” but isn’t that exactly what we should do if someone shoots up a government building and says they did it because the CIA has been following them and listening in through their microwave? Should we necessarily do that any less just because the conspiracy someone latches onto is (as in Chu’s example of John Nash) “International Jewry” instead of the CIA?

More troubling than the association between mental illness and violence is the association between mass shootings and specific psychopharmaceutical drugs—mostly the SSRIs prescribed to handle depression. As this article explains, “Moore and his collaborators extracted all serious events reports from the FDA’s database from 2004 through September 2009, and then identified 484 drugs that had triggered at least 200 case reports of serious adverse events (of any type) during that 69–month period. They then investigated to see if any of these 484 drugs had a “disproportionate” association with violence. They identified 31 such drugs, out of the 484, that met this criteria … [including] 11 antidepressants, 6 hypnotic/sedatives, and 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Antidepressants were responsible for 572 case reports of violence toward others; the three ADHD drugs for 108; and the hypnotic/sedatives for 97.” The fact that some antidepressants, and not others, are associated with these adverse effects even while all produce relapse from depression renders highly implausible that the correlation happens just because people with violent intentions become more capable of acting them out once the drugs restore them to a higher level of functioning: the correlation is not between relapse from depression and violence, but between violence and particular drugs, regardless of how frequently they produce relapse from depression.

Of course, both mental illness and the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals may very well be irrelevant in the case of Dylann Roof. Maybe they aren’t: he was found with suboxone, and while links between suboxone and violent behavior haven’t (to my knowledge) even been studied, a number of anecdotal reports do suggest the possibility. More importantly, even if it is irrelevant in this particular case, granting that holding concern is a racist cop–out will blind us to one very real approach that really could actually save lives in other cases. If mental illness isn’t relevant to this particular case, then say it isn’t relevant to this particular case—but if you endorse the idiotic rule that even considering it is racist, then the next time mental illness actually is entirely relevant, we won’t notice, and we’ll fail to do something about it when it actually just might have saved a few damn lives, because we’ll be too busy censoring the supposed bigotry that it would represent had we kept an eye out for it.

According to Vox, we should “Stop asking Muslims to condemn terrorism. It’s bigoted and Islamophobic.”

There’s a certain ritual that each and every one of the world’s billion–plus Muslims, especially those living in Western countries, is expected to go through immediately following any incident of violence involving a Muslim perpetrator. … Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: “As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form.” This expectation we place on Muslims, to be absolutely clear, is Islamophobic and bigoted. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for Islam and for Muslims. The implication is that every Muslim is under suspicion of being sympathetic to terrorism unless he or she explicitly says otherwise. … This sort of thinking — blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their identity — is the very definition of bigotry. … we should treat the assumptions that compel this ritual — that Muslims bear collective responsibility … as flatly bigoted ideas with no place in our society. There is no legitimate reason for Muslim groups to need to condemn the monsters who attacked Charlie Hebdo….

A Muslimah at the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, in an article titled I’m Sorry I Won’t Internalize Collective Responsibility, concurs:

While politicians and Islamophobes alike continue to pressure the Muslim community into nonsensical apologies based on a homogenized identity, many Muslims have, unfortunately, internalized the narrative of collective responsibility, leading them to issue condemnations of acts of violence and terrorism based only on the fact that we share one piece of our identity. Coupled with the ever present voice of those calling for Muslims to speak out against Muslim terrorists, those who have stepped up to this plate, have not presented a counter–narrative as they purport, but rather an internalization of the dominant narrative where Muslims are guilty until proven innocent.

Nevermind if polling frequently finds legitimate reason for concern—nevermind if 2007 Pew research finds that amongst American Muslims under the age of 30, 26% believe that suicide bombings can be justified, while 27% “decline to express an opinion” when asked how they view al–Qaeda (with an additional 5% viewing them somewhat, or very, favorably). Nevermind if in the UK, 78% of Muslims think anyone who publishes cartoons of Muhammad should be prosecuted and 62% explicitly oppose the very principle of freedom of speech.

In the most recent Pew research of worldwide Muslim support for suicide bombings, Jay Michaelson writes that: “There are approximately 1,083,021,825 Muslims in the 21 countries they polled—68% of the global total. Based on the country–by–country percentages in the Pew report, that means about 133 million support the suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilians. Extrapolating the data—which is probably inaccurate since American and European Muslims probably support violence significantly less, while Iranian Muslims may support it more—that means about 195 million Muslims worldwide support suicide bombing and other acts of violence against civilians.”

Despite every bit of this, the default position of the left is that to even expect mainstream Muslims to denounce violence is bigotry. A tolerated and respected position along that spectrum is that it caves in to that bigotry even for well–meaning Muslims to denounce violence with sincere intentions, and this should stop. Most leftists would say that a far more pressing concern when it comes to our response to acts of terrorism committed by Muslims should be to see to it that acts or even mere attitudes of retaliation do not form against other innocent Muslims in response.

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I’m not trying to raise alarmist panic about Islam; but here’s the point: if we replace al–Qaeda with Stormfront, and we replace Muslims with white people, what above represents the “anti–racist” orthodoxy becomes something we would not expect to read anywhere outside of white supremacy circles. What we’re morally required to say about violent Muslim is what we’re morally prohibited from saying about violent whites, and what we’re morally required to say about violent whites is what we’re morally prohibited from saying about Muslims.

Imagine how the results would be reported if a full 26% of young white Americans polled believed that knowingly killing innocent black civilians in the process of responding to black criminal violence could sometimes be justified—say, by police deliberately bombing an entire housing project to take out a black killer instead of doing their best to apprehend the perpetrator alone—could sometimes be justified. Imagine how the results would be reported if a full 27% “declined to express an opinion” about major neo–Nazi groups, with a further 5% having somewhat or very favorable views. Would the media be praising the tolerance of white Americans in contrast to, say, white South Africans if it was found that 81% of white Americans said that attacks on innocent civilians in defense of Christianity were never justified—whereas nearly 1 in 5 failed, for one reason or another, to agree with this—in contrast to only 72% of white South Africans?

If you were to see someone making the following statement, who would you peg them to be? What would you assume to be the ideological position they were arguing from?: “Many white people have, unfortunately, internalized the narrative of white America’s collective responsibility for acts like those committed by Dylann Roof, leading them to issue condemnations of acts of violence and terrorism based only on the fact that we share one piece of our identity. There’s a certain ritual of apology that white people are expected to go through immediately following any incident of racist violence against black victims involving a white perpetrator. … This expectation we place on white people, to be absolutely clear, is anti–white bigotry. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for being white. The implication is that every white person is under suspicion of being sympathetic to racist violence unless he or she explicitly says otherwise.” Where would you expect to see comments like these supported and condoned? Stormfront? American Rennaisance? Rush Limbaugh, at the very least?

But even the conservatives at Breitbart.com had no difficulty calling Dylann Roof “pure evil.”

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Yet, in contrast to all this, a simple search for the words “white responsibility Dylann Roof” gives me as a top result the following article from Psychology Today: “To admit that I’m white like Roof is to feel guilty …. But guilt is not enough. Nor are apologies. … Perhaps most painfully, it means doing the hard work of taking responsibility for Dylann Roof’s whiteness because he is white like me.” An article posted at Salon and Alternet sends a similar message—the opening words of the article’s title: White America is Complicit. The article begins: “In so many ways, the story of Dylann Roof, the shooting suspect who allegedly killed nine people in an historic South Carolina black church, is a parallel to the story of America itself.”

What would we call it if someone said, “The story of [pick any Muslim terrorist] is a parallel to the violent story of how Muhammad founded the religion of Islam itself?” Oh, right—that would beIslamophobia. Much less if that same writer continued—as the author of the Alternet piece does—to say: “But [the Islamic terrorist] is more honest than those—and there are so many—whose complicity lies in looking the other way, in denying [the history of Islam], in pretending that each new [Islamic act of violence] is an isolated anomaly.” That would be Islamophobia to the extreme.

With a nod to Aurelius Pundit, this imagecaptures the hypocrisy rather succinctly:

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That Alternet article addresses a prevalent sentiment when it complains that “the cops were careful to take him alive, which even the most innocent of black folks cannot count on.” Not only that—but they even gave him a bulletproof vest.

And the claims generated on the witch hunt to find “white privilege” keep getting worse: this photo made the rounds on Twitter, with the caption: “white privilege is murdering 9 people and then having the police give you a bullet proof vest but not handcuffs.”

Nevermind the fact that it’s clearly the left arm of the man behind Dylann in the top–left photo hanging free, not Dylann’s, apparently giving anyone the impression that his hands were free. Nevermind that in the thirty seconds it takes to load Google and type in Dylann’s name, any photo that gives you a view of his side, back, or legs would show clearly that he was both handcuffed and cuffed around the ankles:

History lesson: in October of 2002, 42–year old convicted murderer and Nation of Islam member John Allen Muhammad and his 17–year–old partner Lee Boyd Malvo planned to kill six white people per day “to terrorize the nation”, including plans to bomb school buses and children’s hospitals: “He wanted to kill a policeman, then set off a bomb at his funeral.” Over the course of three weeks, ten people were killed and three more were critically injured.

Guess what it looked like when Lee Boyd Malvo was captured by police:

No heads are cracking and no guns are being pointed at anyone in this picture.

That white thing? Yeah, that’s a bulletproof vest.

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One of the more pernicious myths—pernicious because it tries to discredit a really serious issue through its dishonesty in trying to make the issue all about race—is that we only talk about mental illness when a killer is white. This article from Alternet, for example, was titled: “It’s Not About Mental Illness: The Big Lie That Always Follows Mass Shootings By White Males.” Always—nevermind that the article doesn’t quote a single person who claimed Dylann Roof was mentally ill so we can judge what they actually said for ourselves. For my part, I can’t actually remember hearing this claim happen once until I heard sources like Mr. Chu here raving about how we “always” do it. And after asking around, I can’t find anyone else I know, even amongst my many politically oriented friends, who heard anyone dismiss Roof as “mentally ill” either. Let’s just push that to the side—I’m sure somebody said it. (Right? Sure. Whatever.)

Alright, … well, it’s time for a few more history lessons.

In 1993, Nathan Dunlap gunned down 5 people in a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Colorado to “get even” after he was fired for declining to work extra hours. The Colorado Observer tells us that “In their clemency petition, they contend that Dunlap … had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was experiencing his first mania episode the night of Dec. 14, 1993 … ” when he opened fire. A CBS News article on “Mass Shootings and Mental Illness” discusses “Colin Ferguson [who, in 1993] killed six commuters on a New York Train.” In 2009, Maurice Clemmons murdered four police officers and continued to evade capture for two further days—“the largest number of law enforcement officers killed by one man in a single incident in U.S. history”. The Huffington Post published an article titled: “Maurice Clemmons: Mental Illness Does Cause Violence”.

At The Washington Post, we see that “Muhammad’s [the DC sniper’s] attorneys had argued that the sniper is mentally ill and that he should have been granted a competency hearing before his trial, at which he represented himself briefly.” And The Associated Press published the following headline about his accomplice: “Psychologist: Malvo Has Mental Disease.” In fact, Malvo was spared the death penalty for his part in the racist rampage because of that presumed mental disease (dissociative disorder from brainwashing). Lest I sound wholly unsympathetic to that judgment, I note that even after conviction, Malvo continued expressing what appeared to be genuine remorse for the impact that Muhammad had had on him, making genuine calls to and letters for his past victims—so it appears this may well have been the right call.

Most telling of all, the argument here is really that white racists only want to talk about mental illness when a killer is white—as a disingenuous way of humanizing them, simply because of sympathy due to the fact that they’re white—so take a look at what the white conservatives at The American Thinker did here. Guess what? When a black guy published a manifesto and went out killing, they talked about the impacts of mental illness and the consequences of psychotropic drugs! So much for that racial double standard. Even the white conservative troglodytes you’d expect to be its worst offenders aren’t guilty of it.

You may remember the rampage that began in February of 2013 when a black ex–cop, Christopher Dorner, declared “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” on the LAPD in response to his firing from the department. As one of his first actions, he shot Monica Quan and her fiancé Keith Lawrence in the parking garage of their condominium simply because Monica was the daughter of Randal Quan, who had represented him at the hearing where he reported Theresa Evans for an alleged case of excessive force—even though Randal had opposed his firing. Large numbers of leftists found this “kind of exciting,” as did the Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Columbia University, Marc Lamont Hill, when he said “he’s been like a real–life superhero to many people. … many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people; they’re rooting for someone who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching ‘Django Unchained’ in real life.”

Nevermind that Dorner’s ex–girlfriend described him as “twisted” and “super paranoid” in a posting at “DontDateHimGirl.com,” to which Dorner unsuccessfully tried to file a restraining order against her, or that the female officer Dorner claimed had used excessive force had submitted a performance review stating he needed improvement the literal day before he made the charge of excessive force, or that none of the three hotel employees who witnessed most of the event saw Evans kick the suspect in question, as Dorner had claimed—the evidence here was, at the very least, ambiguous.

It’s not as if Hill was alone in his sentiment. A number of much larger pages were shut down on Facebook in February 2013—for example, see the broken link in the third paragraph of this 2013 article—but one of the largest ones still has over 17,000 fans. The I Support Christopher Dorner page, with more than 14,000 fans, was started by someone who, according to The Huffington Post, wanted to steer the conversation away from Dorner’s mental health: “I knew that the media was going to turn this into just another ‘He’s a psycho ex–cop ex–military that went insane’ story… There is a huge underlying story of police corruption and the plight of a man that tried his best to do good and was relentlessly punished for it.”

So, talking about mental illness is a despicable way to humanize white killers, and only white killers, by making us sympathize with their plight and personal struggles, and we only do this for white killers because we’re racists who only humanize whites—exceptwhen we do it for non–white killers, in which case we’re simply dismissing non–white killers’ valid grievances … because we are, once again, racists no matter what.

Incidentally, the word “terrorism” wasn’t applied to Dorner’s spree until it had gone a full ten days in. Similarly, when Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan, who opposed our involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, killed 13 people and injured 30 more after extended contact with Anwar al–Awlaki, the U.S. government classified this not as “terrorism” but instead as an act of “workplace violence.” Perhaps there are reasons other than race that explain why some acts of violence are called “terrorism” and not others?

In 2010, a 43–year–old Asian man named James Lee entered the Discovery Channel building and proceeded to take hostages, carrying a handgun and wearing what he wanted observers to believe was an explosive device. His motives were revealedin a manifesto originally posted at SaveThePlanetProtest.com: “The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots … on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. … Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! … Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet! … Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. … For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!”

Despite the obvious ideology of Lee’s manifesto, it’s safe to say no one should hold their breath waiting on the mainstream media, or Alternet or Salon, to pin even any partial blame for Lee’s action on people like Al Gore, or extreme predictions like his 2007 statement that the polar icecaps would be completely melted by 2013, a prediction which “if anything … is already too conservative.” (In fact, that prediction that was “proven to be off… by 920,000 square miles”; 2013 blew away the record for icecap growth). Suddenly, the same people raving that talking about mental illness is just a disingenuous “way to avoid saying other terms like ‘toxic masculinity’” will realize that it’s perfectly sensible to think Lee might have been bothmentally unstable and influenced by environmentalist rhetoric to go to this extreme becausehe was hearing and interpreting all of it through a mental state that was imbalanced to begin with.

Sane people, they may perfectly well suddenly see the sensibility of telling us, don’t think holding hostages in a Discovery Channel office is a proper way to deal with global warming, pollution, and wildlife extinction, even if everything Lee said about them was correct. Suddenly, someone taking extreme actions in part due to mental illness, and latching on to a political ideology at the same time, don’t seem so mutually exclusive. The vast majority of people who care about wildlife extinction or consider pollution a serious issue still don’t go holding hostages at news stations. The vast majority of people who believe the trial against George Zimmerman was a politically motivated farce or believe double standards are expressed when the media spends months on end searching and distorting every possible aspect of this case for racism that turned out to be nonexistent (see below) while downplaying or ignoring countless more cases of black–on–white violence[1] over the same period of time still don’t think trying to initiate an all–out “race war” is a good idea. What makes the people who do these things, in either case, different? Mental illness is one perfectly reasonable possibility.

On February 10, 2015, a white man in Chapel Hill, North Carolina walked into the home of three Syrian– and Jordanian–Americans, killing them execution–style. A few early reports claimed in haste that the man, Craig Stephen Hicks, was a “Christian terrorist.” In fact, Hicks turned out to be not only an atheist whose Facebook profile photo was the LGBT–themed “Atheists for Equality” and whose Facebook cover photo pronounced in bold letters his “ANTI–THEISM,” but a long–standing fan of progressive causes ranging from “HuffPost Black Voices” to “Forward Progressives” to “The Atheist Empathy Campaign,” to Rachel Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

How did the writers at Alternet respond? By stating that, that while many have “portrayed Hicks as a liberal, by reporting his Facebook likes included Rachel Maddow, gay marriage groups, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others … that relabeling is absurd on many levels, because Hicks appears to fit the psychological profile of violent extremists—regardless of their ideological stripes….” Once again: suddenly the fact that violent extremists might fit a certain psychological profile regardless of their ideological stripes isn’t so foreign to progressives.

Meanwhile, searching Google for the words “Craig Stephen Hicks mental illness” returns a mere fourteen pages of results, most of which note that Hicks’ ex–wife believed he had a mental illness (video) and add that his current wife’s divorce attorney observed that it’s obviously “not within the range of normal behavior for someone to shoot three people over parking issues,” and the rest of which either pick the terms up across unrelated articles or catch comments like one Sheikh Muhammad Arslan’s at Buzzfeed: “This douche–bag can’t get away with it because he has a “’mental illness”’ and “’issues in his oh-so-difficult life” etc.” Where in God’s name is this epidemic of white people justifying white violence by excusing it as mental illness?!

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As happens so often, the author of the Salon piece’s interest in race isn’t merely misguided, it becomes so narrowly overemphasized that it overshadows the truth about other, highly important questions. The author writes: ““The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop–out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health….”

If Arthur Chu thinks mental illness is “a goddamn cop–out,” then Arthur Chu doesn’t know what he’s goddamn talking about. He worries that “the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day….” When most of us worry about mental illness in an event like this, we aren’t worrying about a diagnosis of dysthymia or social anxiety; we’re worried about extreme cases of things like psychosis and schizophrenia. And do you know who else hurts people every single day? Psychotics and schizophrenics.

A 2009 meta–analysis, “Psychosis as a risk factor for violence to others”, found that “compared with individuals with no mental disorders, people with psychosis seem to be at a substantially elevated risk for violence … [Psychosis is] significantly associated with a 49%–68% increase in the odds of violence.” A 2007 study, “Major Mental Disorders and Violence”, states that “recent longitudinal investigations reported … community violence related to [major medical disorders] … reaching 15% to 20%.” A 2010 study in Sweden, “Bipolar disorder and violent crime”, found that among 3700 individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 8.4% had committed at least one act of violence, compared to 3.5% of the general population. A 2009 study in the same area, “Schizophrenia, substance abuse, and violent crime”, found that the number for schizophrenics was 13.2% (although concurrent use of drugs accounted for some of this increase).

Mental illness is a serious issue, and it does have a relationship with violence. Regardless whether it even bears any relevance to Roof’s particular case (and again, I haven’t seen even a single person seriously suggest that it did to begin with), that’s worth being aware of, and it’s worth keeping in mind, and it’s worth looking for evidence for. The “real problems” Chu thinks it distracts us away from are, of course, rooted in Chu’s own blinkered, partisan worldview which spins cosmological narratives out of the actions of Eliot Rodgers and Dylann Roof while conveniently forgetting about those of people like James Lee, Floyd Corkins, Karl Pierson, or the DC snipers—or even 44–year–old female Professor Amy Bishop who shot and killed six colleagues execution–style after she was denied tenure at the University of Alabama for erratic behavior and inadequate research (it later turned out that an incident previously ruled to have been an accident wasn’t: it turned out she had killed her 18–year–old brother with a shotgun when she was 21). Again, as Alternet itself knows, killers tend to fall into a particular “psychological profile … regardless of their ideological stripes … .”

Even Hugo Schwyzer, writing incorrectlyabout “Why Most Serial Killers Are Privileged White Men” (as I discuss later, in fact they are not), complains that “After Seung–Hui Cho killed 32 people in Blacksburg [at Virginia Tech], media attention focused on the likelihood that a Korean culture unwilling to acknowledge mental illness helped drive the young man to commit the worst mass murder in U.S. history.” Once again, when we do wonder about how mental illness impacted non–white killers, that’s because we’re racists who want to put them down, just like when we wonder about how mental illness impacted white killers, it’s because we’re racists who want to raise them up. Nevermind that the source Hugo references in the hyperlink in that sentence quotes … who’s that, again? “Dong Woo Seo, a physician at Han Byul Mental Hospital in Seoul”. Surely Hugo’s intention was to try to say something about white racial blindness, and not about what Korean physicians who treat mental illness think about how Korean culture treats mental illness?!

As the authors at The American Thinker wrote while discussing the rampage of the renegade black cop Christopher Dorner, “I’ve found that once you’ve restored your patients’ brains to healthy and normal functioning by following the diagnostic and treatment method outlined above, your patients will be doing very well without the psychobabble. People with healthy brains almost invariably find they no longer need to discuss their “issues.” It’s called the indomitable human spirit, and it’s present in every human I’ve ever treated whose brain function has been restored to normalcy….” Chu complains that “When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore what they say about their own actions and motivations …,” but isn’t that exactly what we should do if someone shoots up a government building and says they did it because the CIA has been following them and listening in through their microwave? Should we necessarily do that any less just because the conspiracy someone latches onto is (as in Chu’s example of John Nash) “International Jewry” instead of the CIA?

More troubling than the association between mental illness and violence is the association between mass shootings and specific psychopharmaceutical drugs—mostly the SSRIs prescribed to handle depression. As this article explains, “Moore and his collaborators extracted all serious events reports from the FDA’s database from 2004 through September 2009, and then identified 484 drugs that had triggered at least 200 case reports of serious adverse events (of any type) during that 69–month period. They then investigated to see if any of these 484 drugs had a “disproportionate” association with violence. They identified 31 such drugs, out of the 484, that met this criteria … [including] 11 antidepressants, 6 hypnotic/sedatives, and 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Antidepressants were responsible for 572 case reports of violence toward others; the three ADHD drugs for 108; and the hypnotic/sedatives for 97.” The fact that some antidepressants, and not others, are associated with these adverse effects even while all produce relapse from depression renders highly implausible that the correlation happens just because people with violent intentions become more capable of acting them out once the drugs restore them to a higher level of functioning: the correlation is not between relapse from depression and violence, but between violence and particular drugs, regardless of how frequently they produce relapse from depression.

Of course, both mental illness and the adverse effects of pharmaceuticals may very well be irrelevant in the case of Dylann Roof. Maybe they aren’t: he was found with suboxone, and while links between suboxone and violent behavior haven’t (to my knowledge) even been studied, a number of anecdotal reports do suggest the possibility. More importantly, even if it is irrelevant in this particular case, granting that holding concern is a racist cop–out will blind us to one very real approach that really could actually save lives in many other cases. If mental illness isn’t relevant to this particular case, then say it isn’t relevant to this particular case—but if you endorse the idiotic rule that even considering it is racist, then the next time mental illness actually is entirely relevant, we won’t notice, and we’ll fail to do something about it when it actually just might have saved a few damn lives, because we’ll be too busy censoring the supposed bigotry that it would represent had we kept an eye out for it.

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The key paragraph of Roof’s racist manifesto explaining his transformation from someone who “was not raised in a racist home or environment”into what he became was this: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I read the Wikipedia article and … It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. … this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. … I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

Do these statements make “whiteness” responsible for Roof’s act of violence? To explore this, we’re going to need some backstory.

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For a random sample of the general impression, Breaking Brown speaks about “Zimmerman’s history of calling 911 to report mostly suspicious black males.” A prevalent belief, especially throughout the early stages of the story—Zimmerman is a wannabe cop, and he’s playing out his action hero fantasies on black people. But what does Zimmerman’s record actually show? Zimmerman made a total of 44 calls in the 8 years leading up to the Trayvon Martin incident. And just 6 of that total involved black suspects. Meanwhile, 2 of those 6 were in regards to the home invasion of Olivia Beltaran—and it was Beltaran who, while hiding in her bedroom, called 911 and described the perpetrators as two black men. Zimmerman brought Beltaran a new deadlock because hers wasn’t working, and later on two separate occasion saw the same two suspects matching Beltaran’s description. And there is evidence that Zimmerman actually had, in fact, identified the correct suspects.

In another one of those cases, “the male appeared to him to be casing Frank Taafe’s house, located at the shortcut from the main road. Zimmerman said the guy kept walking up to Taafe’s house and away from it, and he knew the guy didn’t live there. By the time police arrived, the male had left. Taaffe was out of town.” Zimmerman reported the suspect’s race in this case because “I know the resident, he’s Caucasian”—so the suspect clearly can’t be the home’s owner. Once again, race had a perfectly valid reason for being relevant. Zimmerman wasn’t obsessed with black suspects. The calls he did make about black suspects were perfectly proportionate to the number of black suspects actually committing crimes at Twin Peaks.

The media widely spread the myth that Zimmerman used the phrase “fucking coons” during his 911 call. But, “In the end, Tuchman, the audio expert and special guest host Wolf Blitzer — who was filling in for Anderson Cooper — all agreed that the word in question was “cold,” not the racial slur. … the reason some say that would be relevant, is because it was unseasonably cold in Florida that night and raining….” This also makes a hell of a lot more sense of the “it’s” that can faintly be heard preceding the sentence: “It’s fucking cold” is a much more plausible sentence than “It’s fucking coons.” It turned out that while Zimmerman never used a racial slur towards Martin, Martin did use one towards Zimmerman—and regardless of the comparative offensiveness of anti–white and anti–black racial slurs, if these would have told us something about Zimmerman’s state of mind, so they should tell us something about Martin’s.

Even more egregiously, when Zimmerman calls 911, he isn’t sure about Martin’s race—he has that famous hoodie on, after all, and it’s raining and dark and Zimmerman is somewhere behind the hoodie’d Martin in a vehicle. At 0:08, Zimmerman simply describes Martin as “a real suspicious guy.” At 0:27, the dispatcher asks: “Okay, and this guy, is he black, white, or Hispanic?” Zimmerman responds with a very clear note of uncertainty: “He LOOKS black,” in a tone that implies a following “BUT I’m not entirely sure.” My interpretation of Zimmerman’s tone at this point is bolstered by the fact that when Martin turns back in Zimmerman’s direction and starts scoping him out at 1:00, allowing Zimmerman the first chance at getting a closer, and more head–on look, Zimmerman takes the first opportunity to (at 1:10) confirm, “And he’s a black male.”

When NBC first presented this audio, they literally edited the tape to give the very overwhelming—and overwhelmingly misleading—impression that Zimmerman brought up Martin’s race both immediately and unprompted, opening the call by saying: “He looks up to no good. He LOOKS black.” (See this YouTube video for a comparison, and skip to 1:28 to NBC’s edit first.)

Lost in all this hysteria were details like the fact that two years earlier, in 2010, Zimmerman had protested, passed out fliers to black churches, and even spoke at an NAACP meeting agitating to bring repercussions to a cop who punched a homeless black man and failed to be charged or punished for the incident despite video evidence. (“Collison turned himself in … on Jan. 3, 2011 [and] agreed to pay for Ware’s medical bills and make donations to nonprofit organizations, including the NAACP.”)

When the Zimmerman/Martin case first broke, those who were paying attention in 2012 will remember that the media heavily relied on these two photos of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, in presenting the case:

Who could possibly believe there was any plausibility to Zimmerman’s version of events—on which it was Martin who doubled back after Zimmerman to tackle him to the ground—with these images flashing at them every time the case was discussed? Without question, what we saw was a systematic pattern of lies and distortions during the early period of reporting about this case. Had the bias ran in the other direction, it would have looked like this, and few would have failed to recognize how offensively and manipulatively distorted the images were:

In fact, this comparison would have been more accurate than the photos that were actually used (though still unreasonable—photos shouldn’t be chosen to sway opinion in either direction), as both of the above photos were much more recent than the ones that were used. Suddenly, Zimmerman’s version of events would have appeared far more plausible and worth taking seriously—it might not have seemed so obvious to the public that Zimmerman must have stalked Martin straight down and shot him in cold blood.

An even more recent and realistic comparison less biased to either side might have looked something like:

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

In general, the most central complaint about Zimmerman’s actions is the supposition that he followed Martin, directly provoking the final confrontation by cornering Martin down a dark road or alleyway even if he didn’t throw the first punch. Frequently, this complaint adds that Zimmerman did this against police orders that he stay in his car, which Zimmerman deliberately obeyed. So let’s take a listen to the actual 911 call and see what answers we can determine about that. From 0:00 to 1:35, Zimmerman gives his complaint that “it looks like [this guy is] on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around looking about … just staring … and now he’s staring at me!” In response to questions, he gives description to the dispatcher of Martin’s appearance and location.

Notably, the dispatcher never says anythingabout whether or not Zimmerman can, or should, get out of his car. At 1:35, we hear movement: the sound of the chime of a car with an open door, followed by Zimmerman’s car door shutting. He sighs and says with a tone of passive resignation, “Ahhh, they always get away…” At 1:45, Zimmerman is only now doing what could possibly be called “following” Martin—we can very clearly hear the sound of wind rushing through Zimmerman’s phone.

And the dispatcher continues asking questions about Martin’s location—while getting out of his car, Zimmerman says: “He’s down towards the, uh, the entrance of the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asks: “Okay. Which entrance is that that he’s heading towards?” And Zimmerman responds: “The back entrance.” Only now, presumably in response to the unmistakable sound of wind rushing through the speakers for the last ten seconds, the dispatcher at 1:54 asks, “Are you following him?” And Zimmerman responds, “Yeah.” The dispatcher replies again: “Okay. We don’t need you to do that.” And at 2:00, Zimmerman calmly says, “Okay.”

Nevermind that, as the dispatcher himself testified, this was just a “suggestion” in the first place—not so much any kind of command as a ‘we don’t need you to do that’—‘that isn’t a requirement for our purposes.’ An actual quote from the testimony: “We’re directly liable if we give a direct order … We always try to give general basic … not commands, just suggestions.” So, “We don’t need you to do that” is different than a more direct “Don’t do that.”

At 2:05–2:10, the dispatcher asks: “Alright, sir, what is your name?” And Zimmerman responds: “George.” After a slight pause, he adds: “ … He ran.” And at this point, the sound of wind rushing through the phone stops entirely. So, assuming that the wind only rushed through Zimmerman’s speakers while he was speed–walking in the direction Martin was running, and never simply when the breeze blew Zimmerman’s way, the total evidence we have for Zimmerman “stalking” Martin is a maximum 25 seconds, the full duration for which Martin was either nearly or completely out of Zimmerman’s sight. And Zimmerman actually does stop after the dispatcher informs him that following Martin isn’t necessary, even though this was not an order, nor even a request that he stop—merely letting Zimmerman know that the dispatchers don’t require him to do it. Zimmerman does in fact stop, at this point, anyway.

A far cry from the suggestion that Zimmerman compelled Martin to fight back by stalking him down into a corner.

And these distortions were not a coincidence. A report from Ernhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman titled “The battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a media controversy online and off–line” investigated the “phases” of reporting on the case. After a first “act” that consisted solely of local reporting within Florida, “The second “act” of the story begins on 7–8 March, ten days after Martin’s death, when the story received a new wave of media attention from two of the national media’s largest outlets … This resurgence in interest was the direct result of efforts to publicize the story. Martin’s family was able to enlist the legal services of civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on a pro bono basis. Crump had taken on a previous civil rights case and failed to convict, which he attributed to an inadequate media strategy prior to the trial itself (Caputo, 2012). Crump brought on local lawyer Natalie Jackson, who enlisted the pro bono services of publicist Ryan Julison. … Within a day of joining the effort, Julison attracted significant media coverage. He began reaching out to the largest national media sources (as measured by audience reach) and worked his way down until he found interest from Reuters and CBS This Morning. … Huffington Post, … an important early amplifier…, misreported that Zimmerman was white….” They conclude that “broadcast media … is susceptible to media activists working through participatory media to co–create the news and influence the framing of major controversies. … Benjamin Crump’s strategy to focus PR efforts on broadcast media with national reach was astute.”

It is this kind of media network dedicated solely to bringing attention and outrage to (supposed) black victims that is lacking in cases like Dillon Taylor’s which lead to disproportionate awareness of black and white victims of police brutality (and interracial civilian violence) as a whole. Even more background on the story of how the same lawyer who later took over the Michael Brown case and invested his defense in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” lie worked with a PR company (with a history of sleights of truth of its own) to spin their narrative fast to the mainstream media to create the distortions of truth that marked the early stages of awareness of the Zimmerman/Martin case can be found (albeit with more partisan polemic than I’d have preferred) at The Conservative Treehouse.

That leaves hardly two minutes for Zimmerman and Martin to encounter each other, and for the entire fight to run its course, for which we don’t have direct observational evidence. However, what we do have are very straightforward lines of surrounding evidence that make an account of what actually happened in this two minutes very clear.

One of the most relevant details produced by the prosecution’s key witness, Rachel Jeantel, was this: “I asked [Trayvon Martin] where he at. He told me he at the back of his daddy fiancee house like in the area where his daddy fiancee — by his daddy fiancee house. I said, you better keep running. He said, no, he lost him.”

We can combine that with the addresses of known locations to create a geographical timeline of events.

1 is the first location which Zimmerman gives the dispatcher immediately after beginning his phone call to 911 (1111 Retreat View Circle; the clubhouse).2 is the approximate location at which Zimmerman parked his car, though it may have been closer to 1 than this. (“If they come in through the gate, tell them to go straight past the club house, and uh, straight past the club house and make a left, and then they go past the mailboxes, that’s my truck”).3 is the location at which Zimmerman ended his phone call to 911—in the 25 seconds during which Zimmerman “follows” Martin before stopping in response to the dispatcher’s statement, the distance he travels is from 2 to 3.4 is the location of Brandy Latreca Green (Martin’s “daddy’s fiancee”)’s home, where Martin was staying. (Per the NYT).5 is where the police arrived to find Zimmerman bloodied and Martin unresponsive.

Now, the autopsy found that the only injuries on Trayvon’s body apart from the gunshot were those on his own knuckles. The responding officer observed that the back of Zimmerman’s jacket was wet and covered in grass, consistent with Zimmerman’s account that Martin had pinned him to the ground. There were lacerations to the back of his head exactly consistent with his account that Martin was shoving his head into the concrete—call Zimmerman’s injuries minor all you want; but if his injuries were minor, he was lucky. Anyone who doesn’t think this is a perfectly valid situation in which to become afraid for your life is an idiot: it takes almost nothing(warning: violent video) to take someone out this way—a single lucky hit this way can easily kill you, render you unconscious long enough to allow an assailant to kill you by some other means, or simply leave you alive with traumatic brain injury for the rest of your life.

More importantly, Zimmerman consistently stated that hedidn’t know where Trayvon Martin was, right up until the very end of the phone call at (3) when he declines to tell the dispatcher his address for that reason—and Rachel Jeantel testified that he had made it back to the back yard of his daddy’s fiancee’s house (4) when the call dropped. This means the final showdown could not have happened unless Martin doubled back after Zimmerman. The known evidence therefore does not even allow for the interpretation that Zimmerman approached Martin first. While the skin on Martin’s knuckles was broken, Zimmerman had no injuries consistent with aggressive violence. Together, all these facts make it clear that it could only have been Zimmerman’s voice screaming for help on the ensuing neighborhood 911 calls.

All of this backs the complaint against Zimmerman up all the way back to “he shouldn’t have called the cops at all.” People who use this critique have probably never lived in a gated community. Every single entrance to Twin Lakes features the following sign, making it perfectly clear to every visitor what rules apply once inside: “We report all suspicious persons….”

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Part 2: Interracial Crime —Who is Targeting Who? And How Significant Is It?

“According to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), an estimated 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence. That same year, according to the Census Bureau, the white and black populations in the U.S. were 196,817,552 and 37,685,848, respectively. Whites therefore committed acts of interracial violence at a rate of 32 per 100,000, while the black rate was 849 per 100,000. In other words, the “average” black was statistically 26.5 times more likely to commit criminal violence against a white, than vice versa. Moreover, blacks who committed violent crimes chose white victims 47.7% of the time, whereas whites who committed violent crimes targeted black victims only 3.9% of the time.

For many years and for a wide variety of crimes, this pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research. Nationwide in 2010, there were approximately 67,755 black-on-white aggravated asaults, as compared to just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. Thus, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate of 181 per 100,000—fully 201 times higher than the white rate of 0.9 per 100,000. Moreover, blacks guilty of aggravated assault chose white victims 44.1% of the time, while whites who committed aggravated assault selected black victims only six–tenths of 1% of the time.

Also in 2010, there were approximately 13,463 black-on-white rapes … Blacks guilty of rape chose white victims 50.2% of the time … By contrast, the number of white–on–black rapes … reported in the NCVS surveys were so infinitesimal, that in each case whites were estimated to have accounted for 0.0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.” (Source)

Does this mean black criminals more frequently specifically target white victims? The first thing we’d have to control for in order to see that is population rate: “One reason multiples for interracial crime are so high is that there are about 5.5 times as many whites as blacks in the United States. This means blacks are 5.5 times more likely to encounter whites than the other way around, so even if blacks choose victims without regard to race, there are many more potential white than black victims. White criminals are also more likely to have white victims for the same reason. …

… To understand how population differences skew interracial crime rates, imagine a society of 100,000 people that is 90 percent white, 10 percent black, and perfectly integrated. For both blacks and whites, 90 percent of the people they meet are white and 10 percent are black. Imagine that everyone commits one crime per year against someone without regard to race. The 10,000 blacks would commit 10,000 crimes but with 9,000 against whites, making the interracial crime rate 9,000/ 10,000, or 0.9 for blacks. Whites would commit 90,000 crimes, of which 9,000 would be against blacks, making the interracial crime rate 9,000/90,000, or 0.1 for whites.

Thus, even though blacks had no greater inclination to commit interracial crime than whites, the black rate of interracial crime would be nine times the white rate simply because there are nine times as many whites as blacks available as victims. Dividing the black interracial crime rate of 0.9 by nine gives us 0.1, which was the white interracial crime rate. We can make the same calculation for the United States by using 5.5 instead of nine. Interestingly, although blacks and whites are not perfectly integrated, and segregation varies considerably by neighborhood, the same figure of 5.5 applies everywhere. This is because segregation decreases blacks’ contact with whites, but it also decreases whites’ contact with blacks by exactly the same amount. Segregation, whatever its degree, therefore does not change the relative likelihood of blacks encountering whites and vice versa. …

… Dividing the multiples in Figure 18 by 5.5 corrects for this difference in populations, and the results are shown in the black bars in Figure 19. Even when likelihood of encounter is considered, blacks are still much more likely to commit crime against whites than the reverse. They are, for example, 25 times more likely to rob a white than vice versa.

This is still not clear evidence blacks are targeting whites. Not only are there 5.5 times more potential white victims for black criminals—this is what is adjusted for by dividing the white bars in Figure 18 by 5.5—but blacks commit crimes of violence in general at far greater rates than whites. The huge multiples found in Figure 18 could therefore be the combined result of these two things: a larger number of potential white than black crime victims and much higher black rates of violent crime regardless of the race of the victim.

The black bars in Figure 19 must therefore be divided again, this time by the black/white multiples for the overall rates for each crime, which are represented by the gray bars. The results are shown in the white bars in Figure 19. In the case of aggravated assault, the result is just over one, which means the disproportions in black–on–white assault are almost entirely explained by the fact that there are more white potential victims and blacks commit this crime at a higher rate than whites. However, for the other crimes, the ratio is greater than one—1.66 for robbery and 7.4 for rape—suggesting that something else is contributing to much higher rates of black–on–white than white–on–black crime. The fact that these interracial crime multiples remain even after controlling for population differences and overall racial differences in crime rates suggests either that blacks do target whites for crime, white criminals deliberately avoid black victims, or some combination of the two.

… The NCVS also permits an examination of inter-racial crime from a different angle. Figure 20 tells us, for example, that of all violent crimes committed by blacks, 45 percent were against whites, 43 percent against blacks, and ten percent against Hispanics. Blacks therefore commit slightly more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Unlike an analysis of interracial crime—in which increased segregation decreases opportunities for interracial crime for blacks and whites equally—the proportion of victims of black criminals who are white is very much influenced by segregation. Criminals tend to prey on people in their neighborhoods, and underclass blacks who commit violent crimes are likely to live in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly black. Their friends and associates are likely to be black, and the people they meet in chance encounters are likely to be black. A large number of white victims suggests targeting of whites. As Figure 21 shows, “whites” commit only a small percentage of their violent crimes against blacks—only one percent of rapes and three percent of all violent crimes. Since blacks make up 13 percent of the population, this is well below the rate expected by chance encounter.”

(Note: in a future post, I’ll address the evidence for and against the claim that poverty causes crime.)

Could the higher representation of black–on–white rapes amongst interracial rapes be accounted for by disparities in interracial relationships? Perhaps some—but nowhere even potentially close to all. Here’s why: “Blacks guilty of rape chose white victims 50.2% of the time….” But when black men marry, they only marry white women 4.6% of the time. The rate of interracial dating could be larger than this, in theory, if black men are much more likely to marry black women they date than they are to marry white women they date, or if those particular black men who date white women are both much more likely to commit rape and much less likely to marry in general—but certainly this number would still, even granting those assumptions, come anywhere close to 50%. And there is absolutely no reason to think this assumption is actually true, anyway. Comparing black man–white woman (BM:WW) to white man–black woman (WM:BW) marriages suggests similar implications: in 2009, there were 354,000 BM:WW marriages compared to 196,000 WM:BW marriages. In other words, there are only about 1.8 times more BM:WW than WM:BW marriages—but there are clearly far more than 1.8 times more black–on white rapes in the United States each year than the reverse. In fact, there are at least 839 times more.

Not only are the numbers of black–on–white rapes not accounted for by interracial relationship rates, they aren’t even accounted for by combining the larger number of potential white victims with the fact that black perpetrators rape more frequently in general. Even more significantly, if these rates were explained in any way by poverty, why would black perpetrators choose white victims for acts of rape more frequently than they choose white victims for acts of robbery? Recall, as we’ve just seen, that the multiple for rape was 7.4 whereas the multiple for robbery was just 1.66.

Finally, somewhere between 15 to 25% of violent rapes committed in the United States are gang rapes, and as a Bureau of Justice Statistics report observes, “Strangers accounted for nearly 20% of the victimizations involving a single offender but 76% of the victimizations involving multiple offenders.” We find in another BJS report that in 2008, black offenders were responsible for 52.4% of all “multiple–offender sexual assaults” (see Table 48). However, no federal database keeps statistics on the race of victims of “multiple–offender sexual assaults”—even though they do tell us that “strangers” are selected more often, suggesting a reasonable possibility that the preference of black gang rapists for white victims could very well be even larger than the preference for white victims is for black rapists in general (the white:black ratio of strangers will almost always be larger for any given black individual in the United States than the white:black ratio of known acquaintances). Is there a reason why race is reported for the offenders and victims in other cases, yet the statistics on gang rapes tell us the race of offenders but not victims? The race of victims of gang rape appears to be the only category here in which data on race is completely left out of the federal reports (unless I’ve overlooked it buried somewhere amongst all that data).

Black rapists openly confessing to deliberately choosing to target white victims from racial motivation is hardly unheard of. Leroy Elridge Cleaver, who went on to become one of the most prominent members of the Black Panther Party, wrote a book in 1968 that was praised by the New York Times at the time as “brilliant and revealing”. In the fourth thematic section, titled “White Woman, Black Man”, he wrote: “[W]hen I considered myself ready enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically … Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women … I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spread outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”

Similarly, research on prisons finds that prison rape is in fact largely an act of black–on–white racial revenge—thus making prison rape an “institutional” form of suffering of which both whites, and men, are disproportionately likely to be the victims: “The fact remains that blacks continually and almost exclusively rape whites in prison. The evidence is based on studies conducted over the last 40 years (Davis 1968; Nacci 1978; Lookwood 1980; Starchild 1990). Why does this white victim preference prevail? Whites continue to be raped more severely and frequently and at a disproportionate rate than any other racial or ethnic group (in Gones 1967; Bowker 1980; Lookwood 9180). This racial inequality may be the largest in any violent crime committed in the United States. Rape in prison is rarely a sexual act, but one of violence, politics, and acting out power roles (Rideau and Wikberg 1992, p. 75). The act of rape in the ultra masculine world in prison constitutes the ultimate humiliation visited upon a male by forcing him to assume the role of a woman.

In American prisons, studies by sociologists suggest that more than 90% of rapes are inter-racial and may be motivated more by a need for sexual dominance over another race than by sexual passions (Starchild 1990, p. 145). Many rapes are by blacks on whites, suggesting that it is gives the lower–class black, who has felt trod upon all his life, his one chance to dominate a white person (Starchild 1990, p. 145). Consequently, the victims are almost always young white prisoners. Scacco (1982, p. 91) has also noted a disproportionate number of black aggressors and white victims in studies of sexual assaults in jails and prisons. Even if the minority of prisoners are black, the minority of victims are white (Sacco 1982, p. 91). When Lookwood (1980, p. 28) asked ‘targets’ to identify their aggressors at the time of their rape, most were black (80%), some were Hispanic (14%), and a few were white (6%).”

Once again, it is clear here that population rates do not account for the disparity. “Although many causation factors have been suggested for prison rape, they are all overshadowed by the racial categories of the victims and the rapists. Prison rape has been shown throughout this study to be racially motivated by predominantly black inmates specifically against white inmates who in turn are the victims. Although more studies need to be conducted to confirm this theory, racial hatred of whites by blacks appears to be the main force driving prison rape. In fact, the US Department of Justice (1991, p. 15) noted that black (57%) and Hispanic (51%) violent inmates were at least four times more likely than white (11%) violent inmates to have victimized someone of a different race or ethnic group.”

And this is true in prisons even though racial representation in the prison population comes far closer to parity than it does in the general population. When blacks are a minority of the general population, this is used to explain why black criminals end up with a disproportionate number of white victims. Yet, when blacks are a majority of the prison population, this, too is used to explain why black prison rapists end up with a disproportionate number of white victims. You can’t have it both ways. Deliberate targeting of white victims is very clearly a dramatic factor in interracial rates of rape. And why should the psychological factors confirmed to exist in the dynamics of rape inside prisons be any different when those same criminals are outside prison walls?

First, he rightly notes that the data “suggest that only a ridiculously small percentage of African Americans will kill anyone in a given year.” I’ll quote the whole paragraph, because at least on this point he’s correct, and this point is important (even though Wise would prove himself to be an inconsistent hypocrite were someone else to emphasize the same point with regards to rates of police shootings of minorities): “In 2010, since there were 42 million African Americans in the population, for there to have been 8,384 black murderers (and even if we assumed that each of these were separate and unique persons — i.e., there were no repeat offenders, which is unlikely), this would mean that at most, about 2 one–hundreths of one percent of all blacks committed homicide that year. So to fear black people generally, given numbers like these, is truly absurd.”

He goes on, however, to try to address the relative rates of interracial violence—and here’s where it gets truly absurd. He observes that “one could argue … that these figures clearly indicate that blacks are much more homicidal than whites. So, while the per capita homicide offending rate for blacks may be only 0.02 percent, the rate for whites is much smaller: only about 0.003 percent, or 3 one–thousandths of one percent (5,953 white murderers as a percentage of 196.8 million whites). This means that the homicide offending rate for blacks is about 6.8 times higher than the rate for whites.”

His counter–argument, however, is this: “704 whites killed by blacks, as a percentage of the white population in 2010 (196.8 million) was a whopping 0.00036% of all whites who were killed by a black person that year. This comes out to about 1 white person out of every 277,000 who were killed by a black person in 2010. … 413 blacks killed by whites, as a percentage of the black population in 2010 (42 million) was 0.001% of all blacks who were killed by a white person that year. This equates to about 1 black person out of every 100,000 who were killed by a white person in 2010. In other words, although interracial homicides are incredibly rare in either direction, any given black person in the United States is about 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a white person than any given white person is to be murdered by a black person.”

To plug in numbers and words to John Derbyshire’s explanation of what’s wrong with this seemingly shocking number, suppose a population of 150,000 people (N) has 125,000 whites and 25,000 blacks (B). Suppose both blacks and whites kill at a rate of 1 per 1000 (M).

The total number of black murders of white victims will then be the black potential–killer population divided by 1000, multiplied by the white potential–victim percentage of the population, which is (25,000/1000) × (125,000/150,000). This comes out to 25 × 0.833…, resulting in the final number of black–on–white murders: 20.833. Likewise, the total number of white murders of black victims will be the white potential–killer population divided by 1000, multiplied by the black potential–victim percentage of the population, which is (125,000/1000) × (25,000/150,000). This comes out to 125 × 0.166…, resulting in a final number of white–on–black murders: 20.833. Can you see what just happened? The number in both cases is the same. That’s because both (W/M) × (B/N) and (B/M) × (W/N) are the same thing as (B×W) / (M×N).

But because this same number of murders are committed by very different relative proportions of the population, the relative risks of being victimized by white or black killers are not equivalent. On the assumption of equal murder rates, one in 1200 (from 25,000 ÷ 20.833) blacks will be murdered by whites, whereas one in 6000 (from 125,000 ÷ 20.833) whites will be murdered by blacks. One in 1200 blacks being murdered by whites can be expressed as five in 6000 blacks being murdered by whites, so look what that means: if one in 6000 whites will be murdered by blacks, while five in 6000 blacks will be murdered by whites, that means that on perfectly neutral assumptions, any given black person should be expected to be five times more likely to be killed by a white murderer than any given white person is to be killed by a black murder. The fact that Tim Wise finds that, in reality, the actual statistic is “less than three times more likely” sounds meaningful if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be comparing it to in order to make sense of it. But the number he finds is actually less than the assumption that people are equally likely to murder any given individual they encounter would lead us to expect. That point doesn’t work in his favor; it works against it.

There is a very basic underlying concept that is being glossed over here.

Take any given black person. Let’s call him Jamal. One question is whether Jamal is more likely to be killed by a white murderer. A separate question is what the risk is that Jamal, our given black person, will be killed by any given, particular black or white individual he encounters. The statistic Wise focuses on here is the former—which is an absolutely elementary mistake. I’m going to use a terrible, no good, very bad analogy to make my point—understand that I’m exaggerating here for effect to make the point as vivid as possible (for God’s sake, I’m not saying encountering an African–American is exactly like encountering a bear): the risk that your life is going to end in a car accident is much higher than the risk that you’re going to be mauled to death by a bear, in the specific sense that far more people die annually in the United States in car accidents than they do in bear attacks. And yet, that simply has no bearing (no pun intended) whatsoever on the question of whether any given encounter with a bear is more or less likely to kill you than any given ride in an automobile—if you’re being approached by a bear and you have the option of driving away in a vehicle, the fact that more people die annually in car accidents in no way, shape, or form makes it more rational for you to choose to sit next to the bear instead of driving away. Again, black people aren’t as dangerous as bears and most certainly all white people aren’t as safe as a car ride, but that’s still the essence of exactly the fallacy Wise is committing.

The other argument Wise makes is even more obviously absurd. He argues that it’s “precisely because the black homicide offending rate is so much higher than the rate for whites (as noted above, 6.8 times higher) [that] we should expect the black–on–white homicide numbers to be much higher than they were, relative to the white–on–black numbers.” Say what? The argument here is supposed to be that it doesn’t matter that half of all white murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers, despite the fact that the latter are less than 15% of the United States population, because black murderers kill so many more black victims at the same time that—hey—it evens out. The biggest problem here should be glaringly obvious: you can change the black murder rate by changing the number of black victims killed by black murderers as much as you want, and it doesn’t change the relative risk that any given white person faces from black versus white potential murderers a whit—what happens “there” simply isn’t relevant statistically to what happens “here”. The second problem should be fairly obvious in light of the rest of the discussion held here: murder is the one crime for which a wide majority of perpetration is within–race. Black murderers kill white victims only about 15% of the time, but black rapists choose white victims around 50% of the time. If we’re wondering whether black criminals intentionally target white victims, murder is the one crime we have the least possible reason to ask that about—so it isn’t actually a test of the hypothesis at all. I’ve presented more serious reasoning above to show that a fairly significant amount of deliberate targeting of white victims in black crime is extremely probable—and the numbers suggest that this is so for rape several times more than it is even for robbery.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Amongst the cases reported by the Council of Conservative Citizens—which, for the most part, merely links to reports elsewhere, as you can see in the following link—is this case in 2014 in which three black men raped a white woman in public after a rap concert in Indiana. “A witness and relative of the victim reported that she came out of the hotel and observed four black males around the victim’s vehicle and a crowd of people, further from the vehicle, laughing and observing the incident. She could hear the victim in the car screaming and telling her assailants “no.” The witness stated she attempted to help, but another male placed a gun to her ribs and told her to “shut up and watch”.”

Is the CCC responsible for Dylann Roof’s actions because they reported this incident? Which is the bigger problem here: an act of gang rape, or the fact that the CCC reported it?

Despite the fact that the rate of black–on–white rape outstrips the reverse so significantly, white concern about black–on–white rape is considered intrinsically racist even though black concern about white–on–black rape is condoned to the point that even after then 15–year–old Tawana Brawley’s claims of having been raped by a gang of white men were determined to have been a hoax she invented by scribbling the words “nigger” and “KKK” onto her own legs in order to avoid punishment by her parents for staying away from home for too many days, figures like Al Sharpton and disbarred black attorney Alton Maddox (who, amongst other things, filed a demonstrably false complaint of racial bias when two white lawyers were chosen to represent a particular defendant over himself— in fact, they had applied for the role and Maddox had not) “still believe her” and can continue to hold forth this case as evidence of how the deck is stacked on rape for whites and against black Americans. Black upset about a blatant hoax is acceptable; white upset aboutreality is not.

And so the Council of Conservative Citizens is now considered to deserve blame for Roof’s actions simply because they reported the facts that he seized upon and became angry about. Another role reversal is in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy: in late 2014, during the protests surrounding events that had recently taken place in Ferguson, 28–year–old Ismaaiyl Brinsley took to Twitter to declare: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours….. Let’s Take 2 Of Theirs … #RIPMikeBrown … ” before shooting two arbitrarily chosen NYPD officers he had located through the traffic app Waze through their car window, execution–style. If the CoCC is responsible for Roof’s actions merely because they reported the facts which angered him, are the liberals who organized and participated in the Ferguson protests considered responsible for Ismaaiyl Brinsley?

Apparently not.

Apparently not even when the claims those protesters’ anger was centered around were finally confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice itself to have been outright, blatant lies and it turned out to be the case that Officer Darren Wilson had in fact been defending himself from a Michael Brown who first robbed a convenience store, then jaywalked in the middle of the highway, then assaulted Wilson through his car window and attempted to take his gun when Wilson pulled up to ask Brown to move to the sidewalk, and finally turned and charged at Wilson after Wilson pursued to arrest a subject who was now guilty of assault and most likely even attempted murder. Once again, black outrage is condoned even when directed towards blatant hoaxes; whites who are concerned about the possibility that black criminals target white victims for acts such as rape are in the words of Tim Wise “Nazis” who should “starve themselves” and die.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

Statistics on rape like these expose curious tensions within “intersectionalist” feminism—the viewpoint, roughly, that racial and gender–based oppressions overlap to make black women the most unidimensionally oppressed members of American society and white men the most unidimensionally “privileged.”

In general, the tendency of “intersectionalist” viewpoints is to excuse minority crime as a byproduct of “oppression.” In late 2014, a Georgetown University senior was mugged at gunpoint, and in response he wrote an opinion piece for the University’s newspaper title “I Was Mugged, and I Understand Why.” In it, he wrote: “When I walk around at 2 a.m., nobody looks at me suspiciously, and police don’t ask me any questions. I wonder if our attackers could say the same. Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege … [and] condemn these young men … ?”

According to Paul Sperry at the New York Post, in Portland, “after a black high–school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack, according to the Willamette (Oregon) Week.” But it can go without saying that this kind of rationalization would not be used to excuse an assault or mugging performed by some low–life redneck piece of white trash—no matter how “poor.”

If a white boy from a trailer park assaulted his female teacher, smashing his fist into her face until he sent her to the emergency room, the message would still be all about male entitlement and misogyny—nevermind if that white boy is effectively just as “structurally” disadvantaged as the black boy in almost every relevant way. Liberals wouldn’t do it, because he’s white and therefore not “structurally” oppressed no matter what the personal conditions of his life were actually like—conservatives wouldn’t do it, because conservatives generally don’t make those kinds of excuses.

When we’re talking about men qua men committing crime, suddenly all the rules that just applied to minority crime—for example, that when and where a given demographic disproportionately perpetrates a certain vile act, this is really a cry for help, or at least a mere symptom of some underlying disease caused by external circumstances which society, and not the perpetrator, is ultimately most responsible for—change. Now, when men rape it is male culture that is the problem—even though this is exactly what no one is allowed to even consider possible about black violence. Rape happens because “Cis male entitlement is embedded in everything in society … pop culture, media … Even while taking public transportation, you’ll always run into men spreading their legs and taking up much more room than they need.”

But when rap contains lines like “I’ll cut your face off, and wear it while I’m fucking your mother” (Black Vikings, Immortal Technique), the liberal response is that suggesting that this kind of content might play any sort of role in the black culture of violence is something only the most ignorant troglodyte could possibly consider. This writer tells us: “[Rap is simply] artistic expression … Yes, rap can be violent and angry, but that’s the nature of art.” Perhaps you think he’s right. Fine—but how the hell can anyone think he’s right and think that the feminists are right about rape being the result of nothing other than men being given ‘cultural messages of entitlement’ which need to end at the same time?!

Because black perpetrators commit disproportionate amounts of rape just as they do for all other crimes, these two tendencies within anti–racist, and feminist, worldviews speed towards head–on collision. Black culture has nothing to do with black rates of violence—and it’s offensive and disgusting to even consider the possibility. Male culture has everything to do with male rates of rape—and it’s offensive and disgusting to even consider otherwise. But black males commit disproportionate amounts of rape. How can all three of these statements simultaneously be true? When men commit rape, it doesn’t happen (by my lights or by the lights of the feminist) because men are disadvantaged, or powerless, or deprived of and desperate for acceptance or affection and—like the black robbers that Oliver Friedfeld “understood”—after enough pain and humiliation they decide to obtain by violent force the basic human needs that weren’t given fairly to them.

Yet, when non–whites commit disproportionate amounts of violent or property crimes, the reasons just rejected in the case of rape are, by the lights of the feminist, exactly the reasons why they do so. But this way of looking at things does a terrible job of explaining why black criminals commit acts of rape just as disproportionately as they commit acts of robbery—and it does a terrible job of explaining why they choose white victims for those acts of rape more often than they choose white victims for acts of robbery—especially if we include the massive number of racially motivated black–on–white prison rapes in that analysis. How can male “culture” explain male rape even while black “culture” does not explain black rape, while poverty and oppression “explain” black robbery but not black rape? Even the most adamant liberal isn’t going to want to say that poverty causes people to rape, and thereby absolves them of moral responsibility for committing it; that it’s society’s fault, and not the rapist’s. They may consider saying that for robbery—but certainly not for rape. In fact, this is exactly what they call “victim blaming” in any other circumstance. But if “black culture” explains rape, why could it not explain other crimes? And if only “male culture” but not “black culture” explains rape, why do black males commit such greater amounts of rape? This haphazardness should make it abundantly clear that the explanations that are officially designated as the requried responses to these questions are motivated by the raw self–interest of identity politics, and not any consistent desire for truth.

I don’t think any of this is a reach. In 2014, a high school football team in Sayreville, New Jersey was caught in a process of hazing that looked a lot more like sexual assault: “It would start with a howling noise from a senior football player at Sayreville War Memorial High School, and then the locker room lights were abruptly shut off … In the darkness, a freshman football player would be pinned to the locker–room floor, his arms and feet held down by multiple upperclassmen. Then, the victim would be lifted to his feet while a finger was forced into his rectum. Sometimes, the same finger was then shoved into the freshman player’s mouth.” Writing at the far–left outlet CounterPunch, Judith Levine says: “If it’s true that all seven of the football players arrested for hazing in the Sayreville, New Jersey, War Memorial High School locker room are students of color, that is one more reason not to prosecute them as sexual felons. I don’t mean not to prosecute them in adult court. I mean not to prosecute them at all. … Sex offenders are harassed … do we need to lock up more black and brown kids?” It’s hardly a stretch to imagine fault lines forming between feminists who think anti–racists aren’t being feminist enough when they fail to “profile” black men as rapists and patronizingly treat them as if they just need to be “taught” that rape is wrong, and anti–racists who think feminists aren’t being anti–racist enough when they fail to excuse black men for violent crimes when and only when those violent acts happen to be directed against women.

_______ ~.::[༒]::.~ _______

It’s worth making a comparison of the relative rates of police brutality and black–on–white violence in the United States to try to put things in perspective. According to the FBI, there were an average of 14,545 murders per year across the years of 2011–2013. which comes out to an average just shy of 40 murders per day. Since African–Americans commit approximately half of those, and pick white victims about 1/5th of the time, that means there are about four black–on–white murders every day in the United States. White perpetrators commit the other half of murders in the United States, but only choose black victims about 2.4% of the time—which means there is slightly less than one white–on–black murder in the United States every two days.

According to data that does not take statistics reported by police departments for granted, but in fact calls them into question, based on data from the early months of 2015, police kill approximately 2.6 subjects per day—approximately half of which are black, which brings the number down to 1.3 police shootings of black suspects per day.

Of this number, it is unclear how many are justified or unjustified.

According to the FBI, in 2013 police were attacked by someone carrying a weapon roughly 10,000 times—2,200 of those times with a firearm. If police kill 2.6 suspects per day every day for a year, that’s still less than 1000 total killings at the end of the year. Some liberal readers may point to gaps in the data (call it the “racism of the gaps” strategy) and insist on disagreeing, but if police are killing suspects far less frequently than they’re being attacked by them, it seems safe to me to bet that the vast majority of those killings are probably justified.

However, even if we assume that every single one of them was unjustified, combining the number of police shootings of black suspects per day (1.3) with the number of white murders of black victims per day (0.48) would still give us a smaller number (~1.8) than the number of black murders of white victims every day in the United States (~4). More than twice as many black murderers are choosing white victims as the number of white murderers choosing black victims and the number of police shooting black suspects (justified or not) combined.

However, both of these statistics really still need to be taken account of in terms of the wider context that murder only accounts for 0.6% of the deaths in the United States in general. While there are approximately 40 murders, 4 of which are black–on–white, on a typical day in the United States, on the same day 90 Americans will die in car crashes, 110 will commit suicide, 120 will overdose on drugs, 256 will die in accidental falls or other accidents, 1580 will die of cancer and more than 1600 will die of heart attacks. If Roof is concerned about “saving the white race,” then Burger King, cigarettes, drunk driving, wobbly ladders and clinical depression are far more formidable foes than black criminals. But what goes for Roof’s underlying logic goes for “#blacklivesmatter,” too. Tim Wise is right that it’s only a tiny fraction of the black population who commits an act of violence in any given year—the only problem with that is the hypocritical inconsistency we can well know to expect should anyone say the same about racist attacks against black Americans, whether committed by civilians or police, which even combined are still yet only half the size of the fraction of black citizens committing acts of violence Wise himself has just called “tiny.” Whatever goes for the relative insignificance of disproportionate black–on–white violence goes at least twice as much for both white–on–black and police–on–black violence combined.

And it goes even more so for hysteria about mass shootings, which make up only 0.2% of that 0.6% of deaths in America. Furthermore, whites are not disproportionately likely to be the perpetrators; in fact, as with most other crimes, the case is once again in the opposite direction: non–whites are somewhat more likely to perpetrate mass shootings, relative to the population rate. Of the last 22 attacks (from early June of 2009 to the Charleston attack), 10 were perpetrated by non–whites—45% of the total, which surpasses non–whites’ 37% representation of the population across this period of time. If we go back all the way to 1982, the non–white representation of the population from 1982–present is about 28.5%—yet the non–white representation amongst serial killers is 25 out of 70, or 35.7%. The black rate, in particular, is 11 out of 70, or 15.7% (whereas the population as a whole has been roughly 12.2% black across the same period of time).

In that same chart—compiled by the left–wing Mother Jones—you can also see a compilation of statements about the perpetrators’ mental health. And it is obvious that there is a higher incidence of mental illness here than across the general population: Wiliam Cruse in 1987 “suffered from paranoid delusions. A judge found that he suffered from ‘extreme mental illness.’” Colin Ferguson in 1993 “suffered from racial paranoia and was obsessed with nonexistent conspiracies. His landlord said he had ‘delusions of grandeur.’” Nathan Gale in 2004 “was discharged from the military because he was a paranoid schizophrenic.” Jennifer Sanmarco in 2006 “was placed on retirement disability for psychological reasons. Fellow employees described her behavior as increasingly bizarre. She believed the Postal Service employees were conspiring against her.” Maurice Clemmons in 2009 “had a history of erratic, bizarre behavior. He once asked his family to get naked for 5 minutes on Sunday; he said he thought the world would end and that he was Jesus.” Eduardo Sencion in 2011 “was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager and feared demons were out to get him.”

The association between mental illness and mass shootings isn’t a “lie”—nevermind one we only entertain for white suspects. The hypocrites who make this accusation suddenly decide that concern about mental illness is a disingenuous way to disregard a perpetrator’s words, whenever we actually do that, and then they turn around and tell us that it’s a disingenuous way to humanize and try to provoke empathy for evil white men when we do it for cases involving them. When writers like those at Jezebel speculate about “Why Most Serial Killers Are Privileged White Men”, the actual answer to that is that they aren’t—and they never have been. A better question would be to ask exactly what bias Jezebel is demonstrating when it incorrectlythinks they are.

In any case, when Roof says “You’re raping our women”, I could perhaps consider supporting his actions had he actually been in a room full of rapists (regardless of their race)—say, had he burst onto a scene of ‘To Catch a Predator’ before opening fire. But his response was racism of the most crudely idiotic form: it is extremely unlikely that any of the three men he killed (nevermind the six women) were actually rapists, just as none of the 3000 people who died in the World Trade Center had any kind of direct responsibility for U.S. military policy. As with bin Laden, the only thing Roof “achieved” is to help to lend support to the impression that anyone who doesn’t rush to demand that all media reporting any of the facts that were involved in his transformation be shut down is inherently dangerous because they are deaf to that same distinction (even though such suspicion never spills over, in the same way, to the actions of people like Christopher Dorner, even when he has thousands of openly enthusiastic admirers). One of the many reasons why Roof’s actions were vile and idiotic is exactly the same reason why we should all agree that if anti–American terrorism is motivated by grievances towards the brutality of U.S. military policy, it is an idiotic response to those concerns: Osama bin Laden’s actions didn’t led to Noam Chomsky being elected head of the Department of Defense or to a worldwide withdrawal of American military bases from all foreign soil; they led to the mindless reflexive jingoism of the War on Terror and an even more dramatic backlash against Islam itself, and to anyone who saw anything plausible in the suggestions of people like Chomsky at all being immediately labeled “anti–American.” There’s no more reason to demand that everyone who opposes that think every single thing Roof’s mind latched onto, or that everything Bin Laden said about U.S. military policy, was illegitimate in order to oppose that than there is to demand that anyone who opposes Floyd Corkins’ attempted mass shooting repudiate the concept of gay marriage, or anyone who opposes Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s cop executions to repudiate #BlackLivesMatter. A very small subset of the American population will commit acts of violence in the name of apparently almost any ideology. And no, it’s far from clear that these people are always sane—regardless what particular ideology they might’ve happened to have latched on to.

A 2006 article from Tim Wise, What Kind of Card is Race? The Absurdity (and Consistency) of White Denial, lays out the well–known “anti–racist” author’s central thesis: white people are in a self–serving state of denial about the overwhelming extent to which rampant, systematic racism is still responsible for violently holding non–white members of society down—and therefore, by corollary, artificially propping them up—because it would threaten white peoples’ self–image to accept the self–abasing truth that their relative successes are largely the result of racism rather than any genuine hard work or achievement. A consistent underlying current of Wise’s rhetoric is that we can’t move forward on these problems so long as white people are too smug to admit that they are as severe as Wise tells us they are—and Wise apparently sees it as an important part of his mission to knock this self–confidence down a few pegs in order to pave the way for a more sombre accounting of the piteous state of affairs.

The article mentions a few different studies. But I’ve found it to be a significant rule of thumb that if I ever see a long list of studies plastered together to support a point, I’m probably going to find something surprising if I spend any significant amount of time digging into any particular one of them. I’ve only done that with one of the studies on this list, so that’s the one I want to talk about now. He writes: “That bringing up racism (even with copious documentation) is far from an effective ‘card’ to play in order to garner sympathy, is evidenced by the way in which few people even become aware of the studies confirming its existence. How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, (…) that persons with ‘white sounding names,’ according to a massive national study, are fifty percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than those with ‘black sounding names,’ even when all other credentials are the same?”

The study he refers to is Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan’s 2004 “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment in Labor Market Discrimination.” The importance of the study in shaping perceptions can’t be stressed enough: a search on the Web of Science database for the topic “race” in the area“sociology” and domain of “social sciences” shows that the rough average of number of citations for the top 100 studies is around 600. Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? has been cited a whopping 1,555.

What the study claimed to have found is staggering: Quoting the National Bureau of Economic Research’s summary, “In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions. The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender.” The study ‘indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.’” An article at Salon reporting on the study said that “[We] have a national religion… [and] it’s Denialism. … [R]acism and white privilege dominate American society. … This truth is everywhere. … You can see it in a 2004 MIT study showing that job–seekers with “white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews” than job seekers with comparable résumés and African American–sounding names.”

First, a nearly universal impression (which the authors of the study and articles summarizing it have apparently done little to correct) is that the study actually kept the resumes identical, except for race. Wise repeats the assumption almost directly when he says that “all other credentials” in this study (besides race) were “the same.” But this simply isn’t true. The study explains in its section IIA on page 994 of the AER (page 5 of the study) that it “begin(s) with resumes posted on two job search Web sites as the basis for [its] artificial resumes. ( . . . ) During this process, we classify the resumes within each detailed occupational category into two groups: high and low quality. In judging resume quality, we use criteria such as labor market experience, career profile, existence of gaps in employment, and skills listed. Such a classification is admittedly subjective . . . to further reinforce the quality gap between the two sets of resumes, we add to each high-quality resume a subset of the following features: summer or while-at-school employment experience, volunteering experience, extra computer skills, certification degrees, foreign language skills, honors, or some military experience.”

Nowhere in the study was there actually indication that the resumes were kept identical except for the racial connotation of the name of the applicant—and yet this claim was repeated widely throughout the media. Indeed, the fact that “high quality” resumes were given a different addition from one of the “high quality” sets of features already proves that they were not, in fact, identical. Further, in section IIC on page 996 of the AER (page 7 of the study), we read: ”For each ad, we use the bank of resumes to sample four resumes (two high-quality and two low-quality that fit the job description as closely as possible. In some cases, we slightly alter the resumes to improve the quality of the match, such as by adding the knowledge of a specific software program.” Yet again, we see that different resumes appear in fact to have had different qualifications. And it continues: “The final resumes are formatted, with fonts, layout, and cover letter style chosen at random.” We will come back to this later—it actually does turn out to be quite potentially relevant, once we identify the study’s other flaws.

First, we have to ask how disparate the rate of callbacks between candidates actually were. When summaries state that the study “responded to more than 1,300 employment ads . . . sending out nearly 5,000 resumes,” this seems to imply that we’re dealing with very large numbers of difference in callback rates. However, as it turns out, that just isn’t the case. The study explains on p.7 that it uses both male and female names for sales jobs, but uses female names “nearly exclusively” for administrative and clerical jobs in order to ensure higher overall callback rates. In total, of 5000 resumes, 1124 were male. Of this total, 9 racially distinct names were then used to create 575 white and 549 black resumes. If we assume these names were divided amongst the total for each race equally, this means about 62 resumes were sent out for each name. The title of the study compares “Greg” to “Jamal,” telling us that the former received a 7.8% callback rate while the later received a 6.6% callback rate. (I’ll return to the question of the selection of names for the heading of the study momentarily.) If Greg received 7.8% callbacks out of 62 attempts, this means he received 5 actual calls. Meanwhile, if Jamal received 6.6% callbacks out of 62 attempts, this means he received 4 actual calls. The actual difference between them? One call. Yet, in the statistical framing often applied to the study, that one call actually represents “almost a 20% difference” (I’ll elaborate more on the way percent increase is calculated later as well).

The situation with Emily and Lakisha is only somewhat improved. Again, of 5000 resumes, 3876 were female. If we assume the 9 female names chosen for each race were distributed equally between 1938 white and 1938 black names, this means each name was sent out about 215 times. Emily’s 7.9% callback rate would thus translate into 17 actual calls; Lakisha’s 5.5% callback rate into 12 actual calls. Now it may look like we’re finding that the larger our sample size is, the more clearly we find the purported effect—the sample size just happens to be larger for the female applicants. But here is where it becomes relevant to look at the choice by the authors of the study of which names and associated percentages to use for the title of the study; it turns out that the general findings are simply nowhere near as dramatic as the isolated examples that the selective choice of individual names would imply.

In the chart on page 19, the percentage of callbacks acquired by each name are recorded. And if we look close enough, we notice something startling: if we average five of the white female names, Emily, Anne, Jill, Allison, and Laurie together, we get a callback rate of 8.5%. If we average four of the black female names, Latoya, Kenya, Latonya, and Ebony together, we get a callback rate of 8.95%—a 5.3% larger callback rate for the African–American applicants (even though, again, this is actually only a difference of 18 total white versus 19 total black callbacks). If we include Laurie and Tanisha, this only drops to 8.7% versus 8.3%—a difference of 19 total white versus 18 total black callbacks. Why should this be? Why this overwhelming equality between more than half of the sample size? Why should Kristen receive an overwhelming advantage over Anne—13.1% (or 28/215 calls) to Anne’s 8.3% (or 19/215 calls)? And why should Brad receive such an advantage over Todd—15.9% (or 10/63 calls) to Todd’s 5.9% (or 4/63 calls)? The difference in the callback rate within races is as large as most of the between-race differences. Why would employers prefer Jamal more than Todd? Why would rampantly racist employers like Emily less than Kenya (which is the name of a black–majority country)?! And why would they discriminate against Aisha but not against Ebony, a name that literally means “black”?!

Why would Jermaine (9.6) and Leroy (9.4)—who together have an average 9.5% callback rate—beat Todd (5.9), Neil (6.6), Geoffrey (6.8), Brett (6.8), Brendan (7.7), Greg (7.8), and Matthew (9.0)—who together have an average 7.2% callback rate—by an additional 2.3%? Pay close attention to the often visually misleading way that percent increases are calculated in studies like these. The actual difference between 9.5% and 7.2% is ±2.3%. But 2.3 is 32% of 7.2; so the percentage increase from 7.2 to 9.5 isn’t 2.3%, even though that is the actual difference between them—it’s 32%. If the baseline risk of developing skin cancer is 0.005%, and one month of daily tanning bed use increases that risk by 50%, that sounds like a lot—enough to scare most people away from considering it. But what that actually means is that a mere 0.0025% (50% of 0.005) is added to the original, baseline risk of 0.005%, to arrive at a new risk of 0.0075%—or in other words, an extra 2 or 3 people per 100,000 who use a tanning bed daily for a month. In this case, the 32% advantage for the top two “black” names over the bottom six “white” names simply represents an average of about 6 calls for each of these “black” names and an average of 4.5 calls for each of these “white” names—or in other words, one additional call for every 42 attempts.

Bertrand summarizes the meaning of the study when she writes that: “Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback. Applicants with black names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.” In fact, however, what the study actually found was that black applicants named Jermaine or Leroy apparently need to send about 10, while white applicants named Todd need to send about 20. White applicants named Neil, Geoffrey, or Brett need to send about 15. Black applicants named Kenya needs to send about 11.5. And so on.

In any case, the authors of the study themselves actually acknowledge that this is a problem for their thesis. On pp.19–20, they write: “there is significant variation in callback rates by name. Of course, chance alone could produce such variation….” And this finally returns us full circle to the opening point: nowhere do the authors actually state that they did in fact send out identical resumes with only the names changed; and their description lends itself perfectly well to the interpretation that they chose existing resumes, altered them to their discretion, and then applied either a white or black name to that one particular resume before tossing it into either a high–quality or low–quality pile (rinse and repeat for all applicants). If so, this would perfectly well explain why Brad would perform a full 10% better than Todd (or somewhere close to a 300% increase), while Jermaine performs a full 6.6% better than Rasheed, Kristen performs a full 5.2% better than Emily, and Ebony performs a full 7.4% better than Aisha: they all had different resumes. Otherwise, what could explain the shameless supremacy of Kristen and Ebony?

Thus, the actual implication of this finding would in fact be exactly the opposite of what it was universally taken to have proved: how an applicant presented themselves—whether by way of fonts, layouts, and cover styles or by way of qualifications—actually had a far more significant impact on their likelihood of being called back in response to a job application than the racial connotations of their name. Only that, or else all the findings of the study being no more than the simple result of chance alone, could explain why the variation in callback rates between names within the two racial categories was so much greater than the variation between the two categories taken as a whole.

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Some of these problems were explained to Tim Wise by A. R. Ward in a debate that took place between the two of them. The section in which Ward summarized these criticisms was published around Februrary of 2011. In January of 2012, Ward published the entire transcript of the whole debate on his website, writing: “After 5 rounds of back–and–forth I’ve decided to publish the debate for all to read. I’m still waiting for him to respond to my final entry (it’s been 9 months), and I’ll post his response if I get it.” On February 10, Ward updated the posting to link to Wise’s summary and stat that Wise’s final reply was supposed to be on the way. Yet, as of May 2015, there is not a trace that Wise has ever returned.

In fact, the summary that Wise did upload on February 9 included only the first two rounds of the debate—leaving out the part in which Wise faced specific criticisms he has never once responded to—and yet Wise accuses Ward of “perhaps needing attention, [since he] decided to go ahead and publish an incredibly partial, truncated excerpt from the debate on his site….” Wise claims that he wants the reader to “see each completed round as it currently stands, rather than just snippets intended to make one debater seem particularly absurd and the other especially bright,” and goes on to promise that “Upon finishing up my final statement, I will post his closing and then mine, for a fully completed debate.” However, Wise is in fact the one truncating the most trenchant criticisms against his own claims out of his summary of the debate—and now more than two years later, there is no indication to be found that he has ever provided the promised response.

And yet as recently as March of 2014, this study was still at the top of just five references Wise chose to employ in one of his major public speeches, where presumably he would want to restrict his choices to only the most powerful pieces of evidence to pack as much quality into a limited quantity of time possible. Having been made directly aware of the depths of the problems with this study, Wise has not seen fit to address them in any detail anywhere—despite having pledged to—and yet he still sees fit to quote this study as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence of just how overwhelmingly systematic the influence of racism is in employment in the United States today; and his rhetoric has not shifted so much as to even suggest any hint of his comprehension of the possibility that someone might not consider it so obviously overwhelmingly damning after all.

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Do we have any other evidence suggesting what the impact of distinctly black names on employment prospects might be? As a matter of fact, we do. The Causes and Consequences of Distinctly Black Names was co-authored by Steven Levitt, the white economist of Freakonomics fame, along with Roland Fryer, a black economist who after an abusive childhood involving one parent’s abandonment and the other’s physical abuse became (to quote Freakonomics itself) “[a] full fledged gangster by his teens”—but later, in 1998, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at Arlington while holding down a full time job. In 2008, at the age of 30, he became the youngest African–American to ever receive tenure at Harvard. He also maintains an office at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.

What were the findings of this study? In brief: “(…) We find … no negative relationship between having a distinctively Black name and later life outcomes….” The data set for this study was, without question, overwhelmingly more comprehensive than that conjured by the Mullainathan study — The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names looked at birth certificate information for every single child born in California since 1961, covering more than 16 million births — that is, births of real living people, not conjured hypothetical ones. Steven Levitt, in an article for Slate, explains: “how much does your name really matter? Over the years, a series of studies have tried to measure how people perceive different names. Typically, a researcher would send two identical (and fake) résumés, one with a traditionally white name and the other with an immigrant or minority–sounding name, to potential employers. The “white” résumés have always gleaned more job interviews. Such studies are tantalizing but severely limited, since they offer no real–world follow–up or analysis beyond the résumé stunt.

The California names data, however, afford a more robust opportunity. By subjecting this data to the economist’s favorite magic trick—a statistical wonder known as regression analysis—it’s possible to tease out the effect of any one factor (in this case, a person’s first name) on her future education, income, and health.” And with these advantages, the study found “no relationship between how Black one’s name is and life outcomes….” [1] That is the finding of the single most overwhelmingly large study of the impact of the racial connotation of a person’s name on their chance of being hired conducted on measurements of real people instead of extrapolation from fictional “résumé stunts.”

Notably, this study has been cited only 265 times, in comparison to the Mullainathan study’s 1555.

That, for the record, is “an 83% reduction” in the citation rate.

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In the time since this article was originally written, a new study has appeared (“Race and gender effects on employer interest in job applicants: new evidence from a resume field experiment”) which addresses the debates raised by these two studies directly. Specifically, they performed a “callback” study like Mullainathan’s, but when they did so this time, they corrected for the fact identified by Fryer and Levitt that distinctively black first names like “Precious” and “Tyrone” are correlated with poverty (with blacks of the same socioeconomic status, with or without these names, having perfectly equivalent life outcomes). And they did this by assigning the job applicants in their study distinctively black last names like Washington or Jefferson (up to 90% of people with these last names in the United States are black), and ambiguous first names used by both black and white Americans alike (Chloe, Ryan).

They found “little evidence of systematic employer preferences for applicants from particular race and gender groups.” They write: “Fryer and Levitt (2004) show that after taking into account the socioeconomic correlates of distinctively African-American sounding names, the large effect of these names on employer responses attenuates. Our findings provide evidence consistent with this point using newer, experimental data.” In other words, even if employers discriminate against “Precious Henderson” or “Tyrone Williams” because of the socioeconomic and cultural background their name indicates, it appears that they do not discriminate against “Morgan Jackson” or “Jordan Jenkins”.

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[1] Yes; this study does leave open the possibility that race could be a significant variable even once other correlates are subtracted from it, since the study simply didn’t address this. But my purpose here is purely to address the Mullainathan study. And the Levitt & Fryer study most certainly does that. This post is not supposed to be an analysis of anything other than what I have clearly said it is supposed to be an analysis of: the soundness of this study, Wise’s integrity in handling criticism pertaining specifically to that particular study, and the ease with which such feeble data as this study actually contained can become unquestioningly transformed into so much more than it actually is throughout the media without anyone stopping to notice the obvious.

The Levitt & Fryer does, however, strongly suggest one thing that changes the analysis of the question of the impact of race on employment prospects when all else is held equal: to whatever extent employers in the real world discriminate against black applicants, they must discriminate about exactly as much against black applicants named “James” as they do against black applicants named “Jermaine”—or else about exactly as little. That can offer us a meaningful empirical basis for asking whether it’s more likely that employers discriminate against “James” significantly more, or “Jermaine” significantly less, on the basis of race (as opposed to any other number of factors that might correlate with race as well as one’s name) than we would have expected. In fact, since the Koedel, et al study referred to above investigated discrimination against black applicants with names like “Chloe Washington” (a simple Google search reveals severalimages of women named Chloe Washington, and all of them are black—the same thing goes for Ryan Washington, with the exception of a white reporter named Ryan at the Washington Post), we already have the answer to that question.